Microsoft Office Home & Business 2013 - Download - 1 PC

Pros: Nice new features, integration w/ skydrive for stand-alone systems.

Outlook has a new option where it will only keep a specified amount of emails in the OST for a certain period of time, then keep headers only to cut down on OST sizes in exchange environments to improve performance which is helpful.

Cons: The color schemes are pretty ugly, hopefully the office team introduces more color schemes with a service pack.
It's definitely a step backwards as far as a polished look and feel.

Other Thoughts: Aside from if it looks pretty or not, there is no reason to avoid using this version of office over 2010, however there's no compelling reason to upgrade either unless you have a large exchange mailbox.

Pros: - Office looks and works much better with this version.
- Skydrive is a MUST HAVE for Office now. (really amazing!)
- Fast, really fast
- Cleaner look than 2010 version

Cons: I hate that they changed the Outlook icon color from yellow to blue. I still have trouble seeing it due to that change.

Other Thoughts: There seems to be a lot of anti-Microsoft types reviewing this version of Office. I'd guess they don't own it and really have no clue. If you use Office day to day, this update is a must have.

Pros: Believe it or not, there are a few pro's for Office 2013:
Excel 2013 finally restores single-doc-interface, so that you can look at spreadsheets side-by-side. Welcome to the 90s (LibreOffice/OpenOffice has had both options for years).
Also, OneNote 2013 finally adds basic formatting capabilities such as tables with selectable columns. It's now on par with IBM's Lotus Organizer 97.

Cons: The Office 2013 interface is truly ugly and featureless. Gone are many of the important guides and indivators for basic open/edit/format/save functions. Even without checking the tablet-optimized interface options, the new UI wastes tons of screen space with oddly-placed whitespace and strangely spaced-out Ribbon. Many visual cues for what's clickable or not are gone, making it hard to choose menu items, or even grab window borders. Some active items change shading on mouseover, but menu tabs and random other items do not. Word's outline mode now has the clunky MacOffice icons, and requires a bunch of tweaks to have a good hierarchical view. Styles and Templates functions that used to be great for enforcing good common formatting across whole libraries of documents now have so many exceptions that they are effectively broken. (For example, para style checking is intentionally broken by allowing character styles to subvert it; preset styles for headings are inconsistent in different templates; etc.)
On top of all this, Office2013 constantly shills for offsite storage of your documents (in SkyDrive "cloud" service), which breaks policy at every single fortune 500 corp we worked with. For home users who don't do their own backups this might be great. But inbuilt ad-ware for microsoft/liveID acounts, outlook email, and offsite document uploading (no, you cannot turn it off, it's on the Ribbon and in every Save dialog) is a security disaster in the office.

Other Thoughts: After working with Office 2013 for a couple months, we reinstalled 2010 alongside, and just don't use 2013 -- it really is a mess.

Pros: Products are average compared to many others. Biggest "pro" is that many very large coorporations are completely tied to Microsoft via coorporate policy. Therefore they are generally only able to accept documents in the microsoft document format. When you have to work with people who are restricted in this way, it's usually easier to just buy and use the microsoft products rather than deal with document conversion issues.

Cons: expensive for the feature set.

Other Thoughts: I would rather use Google Drive than the Microsoft products... even the Microsoft ones online..

Pros: Very powerful software. Especially with the new cloud capabilities. I use it at work, school, and at home. When I switch from my tablet to my laptop, or my laptop to my pc, my documents are already synced and ready for me to work with.

Also has a feature to edit live; meaning you can have the same file open on two separate pcs and everything is synced while you write; so, it reflects everything you type on one pc to the other. A very good feature for business in my opinion.

Much more I am still discovering every day!

Cons: A little expensive if you are not a student.

Other Thoughts: It is also more customizable than the older office packs.

Pros: powerful office software

Cons: Too expensive. it gets locked to the PC it's installed on so you can never move it to another PC. So if your computer ever breaks down and you want to install it on a brand-new computer you have to buy a new copy.

Other Thoughts: I know this is Microsoft's way of getting people to move over to their online cloud office software but good night!! at least drop the price instead of increasing it! And for all you people who think there is not an alternative to Microsoft office, try using Libreoffice, it's awesome.