Microsoft would experience a free desktop version of Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications, with integrated advertising … and above all, many missing functions. A new economic model in sight?
Microsoft a priori continues to explore different economic models for its flagship product, the Microsoft Office office suite. After having introduced the subscription system several years ago, via the Microsoft 365 formula, alongside the classic purchase of life license in one go, the company would study the possibility of launching a “free” version of its Word applications , Excel and PowerPoint.
More specifically, it would be the office versions of these three software, because the main modules of the Microsoft Office office suite are already available online, via a simple Microsoft account. These web versions run inside an internet browser and require using its ONEDRIVE online storage space to save and open documents.
These online and free versions of Microsoft office applications are also “restrained”, in the sense that several tools and functions are not available. These functional limitations, associated with the obligation to go through a web browser, are not to the taste of all users, and many prefer classic office applications. You could therefore believe that Microsoft plans to satisfy them, by offering a free office version and funded by advertising, but taking into account the constraints identified in this formula, during the test, it is difficult to perceive its usefulness.
Free Microsoft Office: Advertising in office applications
Online media Beebom spotted a new way to access Word, Excel and PowerPoint, without having an active subscription to Microsoft 365 or a license key. After Download and installed Microsoft Office from the official websiteit would be enough to open one of the applications of the office suite then, in the window asking to connect to its subscription or to enter its product key, click on the “Skip for now” button (Pass for the moment ).
A second window then offers two options to use the Microsoft Office suite. Activating a free one month trial of the Microsoft 365 subscription, containing eight applications, 6 TB of online storage and use on several devices, but also a completely free option, containing this time only Word, Excel and PowerPoint, 5 GB of online storage, and especially the presence of advertisements directly in applications.
If this formula may seem attractive on paper, in particular for unintensive personal use, its functional limitations are actually so important that its real utility is questionable. Advertising is in reality only a secondary problem: it manifests itself by a permanent advertising sign, anchored on the right of the application window and that one cannot obviously hide or delete.
Microsoft Office with pub: a lot of missing functions
Certainly embarrassing, however, we could accommodate it in the context of occasional or light use of Microsoft Office applications. But these free Word, Excel and PowerPoint free office versions actually present terribly limited. As the Beebom media notes, the first constraint is the impossibility of saving documents on your computer and the obligation to store everything online on OneDrive. This single restriction immediately removes the main advantage of the Microsoft Office Office Applications compared to their versions on the web.
But in addition, some of the most useful tools and functions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint are simply absent, while they are present, for some, in the online versions of the modules. Beebom makes it an exhaustive list in its article, from which one can notably cite the absence of headers, feet and paintings in Word, dynamic cross and graphics tables and graphics in Excel, or even icons and smartart in PowerPoint ( And the list is still very, very long).
So many frankly essential functions that make the identity and usefulness of Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications, and whose absence frankly calls into question their interest. These “lightened” free office versions (not to say amputee) seem, for the moment, deployed only in certain regions of the world, as an experiment. Microsoft has not yet communicated extensively on the extent and objective of these tests, and nothing indicates that this formula is deployed on a large scale in the near future.