Word, PowerPoint and Excel – what can you do with them? Well, that depends on where and how you get them.

There are different bundles of applications, different services included and even different application features in Office 2016, Office 365 and Office Online. In this article, we're going to take a close look at the nuances of these different versions of Office, as well as the major differences between these offerings.

Office 2016 is a much welcome upgrade for any existing Office installation, particularly for Mac users who’ve been suffering under the rather awful Office 2011 with its ugly, clunky interface. Office 2016 brings welcome uniformity by making the Mac version nearly identical to the Windows version.

So if you've ever been confused about how Microsoft has positioned these products, read on and be enlightened • Also check out: Prev Page 1 of 4 Next Prev Page 1 of 4 Next Office 2016. Is the new version of the desktop Office suite, for both Windows and Mac OS X; the first time the two platforms have been in sync. You can buy Office 2016 on its own, for a one-time price that gives you a licence you can carry on using as long as you like, for Windows or the Mac, but when the next version of Office comes out you'll have to pay again to get it, and you won't get the new features that come out for the different Office applications before the next version – just the security updates., Office 2016 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote – if you want Outlook for the Mac, you'll have to get an Office 365 subscription (which also gives you the Windows versions of Publisher and Access 2016). Microsoft office 2011 update. On Windows, you can choose between Office Home and Student 2016, which again includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, or Office Home and Business 2016, which adds Outlook.

That's what you need if you want to legally use Office for work. If you want the extra enterprise features in Outlook and Excel, like being able to import data from a wider range of databases, you'll need to get Office Professional 2016, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access. Visio and Project are part of the Office family and there are Office 2016 versions of both, but you buy them separately.

If you have the Office 2013 versions, you can't just keep using them because they don't work once you install Office 2016 – but you can contact Microsoft for a free upgrade. You can also get a free upgrade for Outlook, Publisher or Access 2013 if you have the standalone versions of those and you've bought a version of Office 2016 that doesn't upgrade them for you. • Prev Page 2 of 4 Next Prev Page 2 of 4 Next Office 365. Started out as being Microsoft's online service for businesses, to run email, communications and file sharing in the cloud, which also included licences for the desktop Office software, but it now includes all Microsoft's Office subscription services, for consumers as well as businesses. You can pay monthly or yearly, you automatically get new features as they're released and the next version of Office when it comes out, and if you use the mobile version of Office on a device with a screen bigger than 10.1-inches (whether that's a desktop or an iPad Pro), you can edit documents as well as viewing them. You get cloud storage and other benefits, but if you stop paying your subscription, you stop being able to use Office. Office 365 is ideal if you have multiple machines at work and at home, or if your family has several computers, or if you might want to switch between a Mac and a PC, because even the consumer subscriptions cover all of that.