Item: Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Rating: 7
Author: Jeff Eaton

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft 365 Business Premium

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're a consultancy working with large businesses, and Microsoft's Office products are a standard part of life. Although Word feels heavy for straightforward word processing in this day and age, Excel is still the gold standard for wrangling midsized data sets and inventories that would give other tools fits.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Data analysis
Reporting and presentation
Rounds of editing and collaboration on large reports and documents

Cons

Complex tasks are possible, but simple tasks are hard
Mac users are locked out of Visio

Most Important Features

Excel's the gold standard for ad-hoc data munging
MS Word's ubiquity

Return on Investment

No-hassle collaboration with clients and contractors who rely on MS Office products

Key Insights

Do you think Microsoft 365 Business Premium delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft 365 Business Premium's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft 365 Business Premium live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft 365 Business Premium go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft 365 Business Premium again?

Yes

Other Software Used

OmniGraffle, Apple iWork, Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), Miro

Likelihood to Recommend

I'll be honest: as a Mac user, Microsoft 365 Business Premium feels like a poor first choice for day to day work--Numbers and Pages on MacOS are great tools for simple reports and number crunching. But the companies we work with run on Microsoft Office, and having the real thing beats any alternative for simple, no-hiccups inter-operation. Excel, in particular, is still the gold standard--dealing comfortably with datasets that Numbers and Google Sheets choke on.

The real frustration is the lack of Visio for the Mac--when collaborating with colleagues on architectural diagrams and simple visualizations for upcoming projects, translating back and forth between Mac-compatible applications (or using the web interface) is a pain.

Comments

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The simplest way to use the industry standard