Earlier this year, Microsoft raised prices for the Microsoft 365 subscription service that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, and other apps. More changes are on the way, including a new Premium tier, but thankfully not another price hike.
The base Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans are staying at $100/year and $130/year, respectively, with the same access to apps and included OneDrive cloud storage. Microsoft is announcing a slew of AI and Copilot features, which could be interpreted as justification for the recent price increase (and perhaps another one in the future), or as more bang for your buck. Microsoft said, “our customers told us they wanted the convenience of our best AI and productivity tools in a single subscription.”
- OS
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Windows, MacOS, iPhone, iPad, Android
- Brand
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Microsoft
- Price
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$100/year
- Developer(s)
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Microsoft
- Free trial
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1 month
Microsoft 365 includes access to Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on up to five devices, 1 TB of OneDrive storage, and more.
First, Microsoft is boosting the usage limits for various AI features, including 4o image generation, Voice mode, Podcasts and Audio overviews in the Copilot app, Deep research in Copilot, and other functionality. Those features are still not unlimited, but if you’re frequently hitting your monthly allotment of AI credits, you might not anymore.
There’s also a new Microsoft 365 Premium subscription, which costs $20/month. It includes everything from the Personal and Family plans, but with additional Copilot and AI features and even higher usage limits. It’s replacing the Copilot Pro subscription, which was originally the only way to access Copilot features, until those were rolled into the base subscription.
Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers have access to Researcher and Analyst, which are two AI agents intended to help with research and data analysis. I would personally not trust my important work to large language models that can frequently make up information and makes me dumber for using it, but that’s just me. Those agents are available now in the Microsoft 365 Copilot desktop app—not to be confused with the Copilot app in Windows—and coming soon to the Word, PowerPoint, and Excel apps.
There’s also access to Office Agent and Agent Mode, which Microsoft also calls “vibe working.” Those features are supposed to create Excel and Word documents based on a prompt you provide, with Excel support coming soon. For example, could say something like, “Create a monthly household budget tracker with categories like Rent, Groceries, Utilities, Entertainment, Transportation, and Savings. Apply conditional formatting and data bars for % Over/Under Budget,” and the Agent will get started. The Agent Mode in Excel uses Anthropic’s AI models, while the Agent in Word still seems to use OpenAI’s models.
Microsoft’s own tests with SpreadsheetBench revealed that Excel’s Agent Mode has an accuracy of 57.2%, compared to an average of 71% accuracy when a human is doing the same tasks, and 20% accuracy from Excel’s regular Copilot feature. To summarize, Microsoft has built a calculator application that is wrong 80% or 43% of the time, then believed those numbers were impressive enough to put in a visual graph, while also describing it as “like you’re handing off work to an Excel expert.” That feels insulting to Excel experts.
You can sign up to Microsoft 365 from Microsoft’s website, with plans still starting at $100/year or $10/month. Alternatively, if you want the Office apps for a one-time purchase and no AI features, consider checking out Office 2024.
Source: Microsoft
