How to Use Real MS Office Apps for Free
First, Microsoft doesn’t want you to call it MS Office anymore, it wants you to call its office suite Microsoft 365. But a rose by any other name is still a rose. And Microsoft Office by any other name is still Microsoft Office.
So when you go to https://www.office.com/ to sign in, you’ll be reminded not to call it Microsoft Office anymore, but who cares? If you have a Microsoft email address – that is any address that ends with @outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @live.ca, @live.com, or @msn.com you can sign in and use the Microsoft Office (Microsoft 365) like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint and more, for free. And if you don’t have a Microsoft account, click “Sign in” anyway…
If you don’t have a Microsoft email address, you can click Sign in on the sign-in screen above and you’ll see the Username-Password screen and an option to create a free Microsoft email address – either a free you@outlook.com or a you@hotmail.com address.
Once you sign in with your old or newly created Microsoft email address you’ll see this friendly message. And don’t worry, if you have a Microsoft email address you also have 5 GB of free OneDrive space to store all the wonderful documents you will create with your new free MS Office Microsoft 365 account.
And you’ll find free, sometimes helpful tips along the way.
You’ll see that the MS Office MS 365 apps include Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint. and Microsoft Excel.
When you choose one of the MS 365 to use – for example MS Excel – you can also choose from a variety of templates or create a blank document from scratch. Also note, along the left edge you’ll see icons for all the available MS 365 apps – Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, as well Outlook (email), OneDrive (your free online storage space), and Teams which you can use to collaborate and hobnob with others.
Using Microsoft Word
It’s easy to choose a dark or light theme in Microsoft Word
For me and my ancient eyes, the dark theme is easier to see. You may not agree and that’s just peachy because MS 365 Online allows you to switch between dark and light themes easily.
Using MS Excel
If you’re not Microsoft Excel savvy, you’ll find a helpful tour to get you started. You will also find many templates available for Word and Excel that you might find helpful In the screenshot above, you can see I’m using the calendar template.
You can even use voice typing with the MS 365 online apps
Below you can see a voice-typed, hand-edited, MS Word document I created online using a free MS 365 account. Notice that MS Word does not like “I tells ya”, I tells ya!
While Microsoft says that MS 365 Premium Apps have more features than the free versions we say hooey! If you don’t want to pay for Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, you’ll find the free online versions of those programs as least as good as some of the free MS Office alternatives. And you can access them for the price of a free Microsoft email address – which you also use, believe it or not, to send and receive email!
Yes, you can save documents created with the MS 365 online apps to your computer
Although MS 365 online saves all your finished and unfinished documents online, you can also save documents you create with the free MS 365 apps to your computer or other devices.
Ready to try Microsoft Office Microsoft 365 Online?
If you’re ready to try MS 365 online, just visit https://www.office.com/ and sign in with your Microsoft email address – or sign up for a free Microsoft address from that page.
TC, thanks for this info. I have MS 365, for which I paid $69. I don’t want to keep paying, but, will I lose my docs in Word and Excel if I don’t pay when that membership is ready for renewal? How will I handle that? Do the docs look different? Will I still be able to have the docs on auto save? Thanks for your reply and for all your and Darcy’s help over these many years!! Your help has been so valuable!
Any documents you create with MS 365 (premium/paid) version won’t disappear from your computer when you cancel your subscription, but you will lose the 1 TB of space on OneDrive that comes with an MS 365 subscription. OneDrive space will revert back to the 5 GB of space that comes with free OneDrive accounts. So, it would be wise to download any MS 365 documents you have on OneDrive and save them to your computer if they are not already saved to your computer.
There won’t be a difference in the appearance of the documents you create on the free MS 365 but the paid subscription, besides allowing you to download MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc. programs to your computer, has other features that are not included in the free version. But the basic programs and functions are there. However, before you switch, you should make sure you know the differences. Here’s an article that tells you, in detail, the differences between the free and paid versions of MS 365.
Keep in mind that this article was not written for those using already using MS 365, it was written as another option for people who are using free MS Office alternatives like Open Office, Libre Office, etc. Those who don’t want to pay for MS Office program but want to read, access, edit, and/or create MS Office documents without buying MS Office (MS 365).