Office is a useful software, but the pricing should be considered.
October 16, 2019
Office is a useful software, but the pricing should be considered.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Office 2016
Microsoft Office is one of the most essential software in our organization. I mostly use MS Word for copywriting purposes, be that writing a simple article for our company's official blog or crafting social media posts. Other than Word, there are many more products from this software bundle we use daily in our organization. For example,
The main problem that a copywriter like me faces is proofreading and formatting. Grammatical errors and bad formatting can ruin any marketing campaign. And I resolve this issue with Word. OneNote is a pretty useful tool too. It helps me pen down ideas and information that otherwise would have been forgotten.
- Our accountant uses Excel to maintain accounts and create various reports.
- PowerPoint is being used for presentations in almost all departments.
- Outlook is a pretty handy tool to have a track on emails without leaving the main workflow, so it's installed on almost every PC in our company.
The main problem that a copywriter like me faces is proofreading and formatting. Grammatical errors and bad formatting can ruin any marketing campaign. And I resolve this issue with Word. OneNote is a pretty useful tool too. It helps me pen down ideas and information that otherwise would have been forgotten.
- Word is the best software to create documents or textual content to date. It is full of features which allow formatting write-ups pretty easily.
- PowerPoint is amazing for making slide shows for meetings or while discussing project roadmaps. One can easily present ideas accurately in the form of slides.
- Excel makes managing accounts really easy and error free. Besides that it helps employees make various reports such as expenses, sales etc. The graphical representation of the numbers, allow other non technical members understand them.
- It is pretty annoying to open the browser again and again to check emails. With Outlook I don't have to do that anymore. It helps to organize emails and keep it distraction-free.
- Most of all, the speed Office offers is unmatchable. The products in this software bundle work without lagging even in a below-average PC.
- The price is too high. There are a lot of PCs in the organization. Licensing each PC costs us a lot. Microsoft should reconsider their pricing.
- Sometimes one needs a distraction free platform to write stuff. Word is jam-packed with a lot of options that is not needed by everyone. So an option to remove most features and provide a minimal editor should be added.
- The proofreading system of Word is not the greatest in the market. Yes, it detects spelling mistakes and basic grammatical mistakes. But some major errors are always left undetected most of the time. I have to use an additional proofreading software to properly curate a piece of content.
- Excel is a complex software and requires serious training. There are lots of formulas in Excel but aren't mentioned in the software itself. Hence making it user friend will help a lot of slow learning users.
- Online marketing is the only form of marketing our organization uses. And as a copywriter in my organization, I am responsible for all the blog posts, social media posts, and advertising content that the company publishes. So basically, marketing depends a lot on my write-ups. Word has really helped me with writing well-curated, nicely formatted content for the marketing campaigns. Considering the number of clients my organization has attracted (through online marketing only) over the last few months, I can assume the ROI is pretty good.
- Managing various expenses, client information, selling reports, employee accounts etc., would have been a disaster if we didn't have Excel.
- The only negative impact has been the pricing. Though we use most of the Office in our organization, there are a lot of technical products such as the Adobe bundle, JetBrains bundle etc., that we must use. Other than Word, none other Office products are actively needed to our main work functions. So being a small business it negatively impacts our budget.
There are a lot of alternatives to MS office 2016 such as Google Suite, LibreOffice or Zoho. Among them, the closest competitor to MS Office is the Google Suite. Each of the G suite products such as Docs, Sheets or Slides are free when used separately. But, using them separately gets pretty annoying. Buying the full suite would have made sense if it was less costly. Also, it doesn't work offline natively as MS Office does. Hence, we use Microsoft Office 2016 for our operations.
Do you think Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued) delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued)'s feature set?
Yes
Did Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued) live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued) go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued) again?
No