On Monday, Microsoft announced public availability of Office 2013. You can buy it the usual way: pay your money and own it forever. You can also buy it by subscription, and the home package is a real deal – Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Publish, and Access, for five computers for a hundred bucks a year. I went to Amazon, bought the package, with is called Office 365 Home Premium, and installed it on the first machine, a laptop running Windows 8.
The installation went smoothly, with the usual Microsoft new-style look and feel and the ability to start using the package while the rest of it installed in the background. One particularly nice thing about the installation: Outlook 2013 picks up all your account information from your old Outlook installation. All you have to do is enter your Exchange password and you’re good to go.
I next installed it on a desktop running Windows 7. That was also a smooth process. The only glitch was that Outlook wouldn’t do an automatic send/receive. I finally traced the problem to a plug-in that was incompatible with Outlook 2013, the NEC assistant. I deactivated the plug-in and everything was fine.
Flushed with success, I tried the installation on another Win 7 desktop. After a minute or two, when I tried to go back to the installer after looking at a web site, the window was blank. It remained blank for half an hour. I played with it a while and it refreshed itself, asked me some questions, and then started the bulk of the download.
While that was finishing, I went to a Win 7 laptop and tried an installation. This time I got the following message:
I clicked OK, then saw:
Plenty of space. Fast Internet connection.
I redownloaded the installer and tried again. Same old same old.
After awhile, I found the solution on the Internet:
That worked.
But the download went really slow. he installer though so, too, because it said:
After about a hour, it was all installed.
I only had one more installation left on the copy of Office 365 that I’d bought, and I had two more machines to upgrade, so I went to Amazon and bought another copy. When I went to the Microsoft Office web site, I couldn’t find it, but they said that they’d added a year to the subscription that I already had:
That’s not what I wanted. I can’t find out any way to get another copy other than setting up a new Microsoft ID and telling the store not to remember me. That’s a lot of trouble. I think I’ll just buy a different product for the last machine.
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