#1 most frequent
United States of America
36.3%1,315,457 installations of 3,626,005
What is Microsoft 365?
Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) is a Microsoft Cloud subscription service that includes Microsoft Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access). The software can be installed across multiple devices and ensures that users always have the most up-to-date version of the included Office applications.
Categories & Use Cases
Videos
Who Buys & Uses Microsoft 365
#2 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
9.6%348,117 installations of 3,626,005
#3 most frequent
Germany
6.1%222,726 installations of 3,626,005
The reliable standard of office suites
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Microsoft 365 as our office suite of choice. It is the default option for any documentation, presentations or spreadsheets needed to conduct business.
We use it to connect with our teams around the world, sharing knowledge, intellectual property and reference work.
It's fundamental to our ability to operate as a consulting entity.
Pros
- Is the default choice for most enterprises, making it easy to collaborate
- Provides online and desktop versions
- Makes it easy to swap between different accounts, be they internal or client
Cons
- On mac, the desktop apps often have memory leak issues
- Multiple editing on the same powerpoint deck can make it near impossible to use
- The editing/review mode of word doesn't exist in powerpoint
Return on Investment
- It's use unlocks significant revenue opportunities as we're able to pull together proposals leveraging content from around the world
- It expedites our time to market as we're able to easily leverage other work as it's the defacto file format standard
- The addition of GenAI functionality has done little to impact our ROI
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Google Workspace and Notion
Other Software Used
Notion, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Teams
You can do this stuff for free -- or pay to do it right.
Pros
- Skype for Business is an excellent program for communicating not only in office, but with other Office 365 users across Windows, Mac and mobile platforms.
- Onedrive, included with a suite of products you are already buying, is a sufficient cloud-file storage program.
- Outlook is good for organization-wide mailing lists and ease of distribution. It organizes contacts well across a large company.
Cons
- Skype for business lacks the ability to EVER communicate with personal Skype accounts. Some of our vendors do not subscribe to Office 365 and therefore are shut out of this communication process.
- Outlook is a bit bare-bones on email coding and html and tries to be everything to everyone, integrating calendars, schedules, and many other functions instead of just being an outstanding email program.
- OneDrive is nothing special at the end of the day. Sharing of files across user groups is mildly less intuitive than Google Drive or Dropbox and lacks a good "backup" feature should files go missing.
Return on Investment
- Easy to schedule conversations; keep paper trails; and generally organize tasks and meetings.
- Can't communicate or share with vendors who do not subscribe to office 365.
- Easy to share files, make edits and communicate with other 365 users.
- There are free vendors out there -- but the larger the organization, the more difficult that becomes to implement consistently.
Alternatives Considered
Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive and Slack
Other Software Used
Adobe Illustrator CC, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Kronos Workforce Central
O365 Review
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use 365 for all users with mailboxes and with different licenses
Pros
- Outlook and Mail
- Sharepoint
Cons
- It would be nice if AI were included in all the Office tools included in the package, thus improving the ability to create, modify, and correct documents.
Return on Investment
- Tools like Teams, SharePoint, and Planner enable more fluid collaboration, reducing lead times and improving operational efficiency.
- Features such as multi-factor authentication and threat protection have reduced risks and costs associated with cybersecurity.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Google Workspace
Other Software Used
Google Workspace, LibreOffice, Apple iWork
Hard to compete with the OG.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Communication and office tools, like I would assume many others. Teamwork activities and knowledge management are also important. The need to create documents with Word, PPT, XLS, and be able to share them quickly for easy view or edit access, and collaborative work all around. Broadcasting through teams, news, SharePoint, and other tools effectively summarizes the use.
Pros
- Chat with teams and the integrations with the other apps, and many more smaller ones, like to-dos, news, and the recent Outlook integration.
- Easy embedding on SharePoint to broadcast all the content created in the different tools.
- The office package is still robust with the good things from the past and new additions.
Cons
- Permissions. They are challenging to manage when you want to get granular, as some things require erasing and starting over again. Additionally, some people or groups have permissions they shouldn't have, and root cause analysis is not always intuitive.
- They need to pay attention to clutter and reduce it if the app's performance, such as Teams, is being harmed.
- The tier system for services allows users to utilize some AI capabilities without requiring the most complex license.
- Visio feels like it was forgotten when compared to lucidchart or Miro.
Return on Investment
- Quick collaboration is a game-changer. Now getting a peer review and not losing versions is a breeze, making KM easier and more efficient.
- Analytics with Excel for easy to mid, Power BI and Power Query for more complex. Having all these different tools and content to teach how to make the most of them enables people to focus on business value more quickly. And with the advent of LLMs, even more.
- Broadcasting is also more efficient, as it is specific to stakeholders who are merely users or provide minimal value in the creation process, but are crucial in the deployment. Being able to integrate a dashboard with a presentation, plus a document, all in a few clicks, is very efficient.
- It's not hard to create workflows where automations and processes can be deployed from creation to collaboration to broadcast.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Surveys and Apache OpenOffice
Other Software Used
monday.com, DaVinci Resolve, xAI Grok, ChatGPT, Python IDLE
A Key Users take of Microsoft 365.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use 365 primarily for Outlook—we don't use the Exchange server, but we do use IMAP, so this serves our purpose perfectly. We also use Word for some minor invoicing and Excel for our pricelists. Sometimes, we will use Publisher, so we are glad we still have the option to use it.
Pros
- It allows us to keep our email organized. I like the fact that I can create folders in Outlook, and they replicate on my mail server.
- Excellent for drafting and saving those documents as PDFs without needing PDF editing software.
- Spreadsheets - what more is there to say?
Cons
- Fix Outlook. It crashes constantly, uses way too many resources, and freezes to the point that I need to shut it down in the Task Manager.
- Excel could use an easier numbering function. I used to drag down, and it would number the cells ascending. Somewhere, it lost this function and just copied the same number down the column, which is kind of useless.
- Someone needs to create (and include) a quick and easy cheat sheet for commonly used formulas. It would be nice if a drop-down would let you choose a formula (without all the prior programming).
Return on Investment
- We have a lot of nonprofit users, so they have a good ROI.
- I like the constant updates without having to purchase the software repeatedly.
- I used to purchase each Office (insert year here) often, so the software was up to date and had the newest options and connectors. I think my return on investment would have been much better if Microsoft had updated those versions to keep them current; after all, we did pay for them.
- Microsoft 365's offering a monthly fee or a discount for a year helps, and you can look at it as a free backup if you have everything set to back up to One Drive. (Cloud-based document filing you can access anywhere ( with an internet connection)—you Can't beat that!)
Usability
Other Software Used
Adobe Acrobat, Adobe PhotoShop, GoTo Resolve
