Though consumers can still buy Microsoft’s new Office products on physical media, the software giant hopes they will subscribe to its new Office 365 products instead.

Office 365 comes in various flavours and the box retailers will carry contains no media but, instead, a card with a product key. Welcome to the new Office.

For an annual subscription of R750, users can get access to the full suite of Office 365 products — packaged as Office 365 Home Premium — for use on five PCs or Macs. They’ll also get 20GB of additional SkyDrive storage — SkyDrive is Microsoft’s cloud-based storage solution — and an hour of Skype minutes.

The package includes old favourites such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook and, because it’s a subscription service, users will have access to all future upgrades as long as their payments are current.

For the same price, students can opt for Office 365 Student edition, which includes the same software (with the exception of Publisher and Access) but limits usage to two PCs while extending the subscription’s validity to four years. Students who need to extend their subscription can purchase another Student package for an additional four years.

Given that Office 365 is US$100/year in US, the South African pricing is very competitive.

Uriel Rootshtain, business leader of Microsoft South Africa’s Office division, says that the move away from physical media is a departure from the traditional model Microsoft has used, but is in line with consumers’ increasingly moving their work online, seeking to collaborate, and wanting to be able to access content and services on a range of devices.

“People are using multiple devices and home and work life has merged,” Rootshtain says. “Consumers need to be able to do anything from anywhere.”

Though it’s possible to install the software on PCs or Macs, Mac users will find they get the older Microsoft Office 2011 rather than 2013.

Rootshtain says Microsoft has taken into account the ways in which connectivity has changed how people work and what sort of information they expect from products. The new Outlook, for example, now includes social integration that shows contacts’ recent activity on social networks and can integrate this with existing conversations.

Office 365 is also well suited to Windows 8 tablet computers or hybrid devices and users can shift from desktop to touch mode with ease. Touch mode includes touch controls and on-screen keyboard functionality while retaining all of the core features of the applications.

Because of the integration with SkyDrive, it’s also possible to work on documents or other items in collaboration with others, track changes and pick up work where it was left off on other devices.

PowerPoint has also been overhauled, particularly in terms of the presenter view. “Now you can see your current slide, next slide and speaking notes while the audience only sees the slide you want them to,” Rootshtain explains. “There is also support for zoom functionality, pen input for annotations, the ability to skip to any slide in the presentation without having to click through other slides to get to it, and even a built-in laser pointer feature.”

Excel also gets new features including “flash fill”, a pattern recognition feature that automatically completes sets of data and can be used for plucking names from e-mails or completing sequences. “Quick analysis” is another new feature. It quickly highlights differences or similarities between data visually, and allows for the creation of graphs and other graphic data representations.

Word, meanwhile, gets a range of new layout options for images including guidelines for alignment and intelligent text wrapping. It can also open PDFs as editable documents and users can imbed images or video directly from the Web without leaving the application itself.

Perhaps most impressive is Microsoft’s “Office-on-demand” feature, which allows Office 365 subscribers to download the application they wish to work in to a machine that doesn’t have it by simply using their user ID. At the end of the session, the software installation is removed.

Microsoft has yet to announce pricing for Office 365 Small Business Premium but this will be released on 27 February.

Users can also opt for the traditional outright purchase of Office. Here pricing ranges from R990 for the Student edition to R2 400 for the Business and Home editions and R4 300 for the Professional suite.