MS Office 365. All day. Every day.
March 27, 2017
MS Office 365. All day. Every day.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Microsoft Office (Installed)
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Office 365
We use Microsoft Office 365 across all departments in our company. The ubiquitous spreadsheet is important to everything we do from inventory management, financial management, accounts receivable, and accounts payable. We use a very robust and comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, but the reporting capabilities of Microsoft Office 365 are unmatched in any application I've ever seen. We use Microsoft Office 365 to help us make virtually all of our mission-critical business decisions. I personally spend more than 50% of my workday in non-Outlook Microsoft.
- Reporting capabilities. Because Microsoft Office 365 can connect to a variety of back-end databases, we can get on demand reports on all kinds of business processes tracked in our ERP.
- Visual Basic for Applications. While it does require programming knowledge, the ability to extend MS Office 365 applications is virtually unlimited. We have been able to created fully-functional add-on applications using the capabilities of MS Office 365.
- Always up-to-date. Because MS Office 365 is offered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), I know I always have the most up-to-date features at my disposal.
- Easy of use. Microsoft has done a lot to ensure that MS Office 365 is user friendly and robust. Few applications are as hard to break as MS Office 365.
- Ribbon Customization. When the ribbon was first introduced, I had my challenges with it. One challenge that hasn't gone away is the difficulty at adding custom commands to the ribbon.
- Failure to Launch. One of the features that appears somewhat unique to the desktop version of MS Office 365 is the failure of documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks to load. The preview on the Start bar (Winodows 7 Professional 64-Bit) shows it open but you can't actually see the document. Clicking the preview close button and re-opening the document is the only way to get it to open. This is particularly true when opening an attachment directly from an email.
- Big. This isn't necessarily an avoidable problem but MS Office 365 takes up a lot of room. I run OpenOffice and MS Office 365 and MS Office 365 is quite a bit larger on disk.
- The investment in MS Office is so small when compared to the benefits that I feel like there is immediate ROI. Alright, maybe it takes a day's worth of use to pay for itself but I have entire departments that couldn't function without MS Office 365.
- Because OpenOffice is free, you can look at MS Office as something that negatively impacts cash flow. However, OpenOffice doesn't have the power of MS Office 365.
- OpenOffice and G Suite
I won't disparage OpenOffice or G Suite - I think both are good applications. However, from an ease-of-use and functionality perspective, I still prefer MS Office 365. There's a reason people keep paying for it the world over even when free options are available. It's just good. It's powerful - more powerful and feature-packed than it's free cousins.