Microsoft 365 Family | Office 365 apps | up to 6 users | 1 year subscription | Multiple PCs/Macs, Tablets and Phones | multilingual | Box | UK Version

Amazon has global distribution, Microsoft has region-locked software/licensing. Read the reviews. Don’t buy if you’re in Australia. This software/licence is limited to Europe and cannot be installed in Australia (without other means).

I don’t like being forced into recurring subscriptions, so every couple of years I look around for a good deal. Buying these product keys for Microsoft 365 online saves money and they are really easy to install on your account page. Sign in to your Microsoft account add the product key and your licence is extended by another year. I often add two years together. You don’t need to wait until your current term expires before using them. Sure, you have to untick the automatically selected option to ‘turn on recurring billing’ every time you add a code, but that isn’t too difficult. It automatically updates the subscription period for all users next time they sign in.

I purchased this to renew my subscription from Office 365 Home to the Renamed Office 365 Family. This is the third renewal I have made using a purchased product code, and whilst the codes are genuine and eventually renew for the full year, my success rate in doing it first time has varied. The first time I did this 2 years ago, the code was accepted but the subscription did not renew. I had to contact Microsoft Uk, who blamed my browser for the glitch, saying I should have used Microsoft Edge to go through the renewal process. Eventually it worked OK. The second time I did this was last year, using Microsoft Edge and everything worked OK, the code was accepted and my renewal for the year was a success. This most recent renewal did not work first time, the product code being accepted and my account subscription renewing OK and showing the correct expiry date in 2021. However my apps, Excel and Word did not seem to know that I had renewed and kept warning me that they were about to expire. I discovered that by reluctantly turning on automatic renewal, this seemed to clear the problem and the warnings disappeared. I then had the problem of not being able to turn off automatic renewal so had to contact Microsoft yet AGAIN to resolve that issue. Summarising, the product is fine but Microsoft seem to like to make life difficult for people having the audacity not to buy the renewal on line from them.

Bought this as a 12 month extension to my existing Microsoft subscription. Struggled to find the correct webpage to accept the product key to activate it. When I did eventually enter the product key it came up with an expiry date in Jan 2021 – just 2 1/2 months away!! What a wast of time and effort. Spoke to Microsoft who couldn’t help me as it was purchased from a 3rd party – Amazon. Spoke to Amazon and could only get a refund so I sent it back.
Interestingly I asked about a replacement with new key valid for 12 months and was told they could not guarantee this!! DO NOT BUY

I doubt there’s anyone who hasn’t heard of the Microsoft Office suite, but I expect there’s a fair number of people who might object to the idea of a subscription model. So let me balance this out: You’re actually getting a lot for your money. Not only do you get a full Office suite which is continually updated and can be used by up to six people at the same time, but you’re also getting 60 free Skype minutes a month and 1TB of OneDrive storage space. At the normal price, it’s a fairly good deal, but if you can bag this for less than £50 for a year, it’s a bit of a steal just for the storage space alone.

To put it into some context for those who prefer the “one price forever” model, the same suite would cost you around £100 for one user, so to license for six users would cost £600. Even at the stock price of £79.99 a year, you can have the subscription for seven years and still be saving money and that’s before you factor in the cost of OneDrive or Skype minutes. And on top of that you’ll still have a new version of Office to use, instead of one that would have been superceded at least twice and is probably running on empty for support or updates.

Granted, it doesn’t stack up quite so well for a single user license, but if you’ve got a few people in the family who use it, it’s well worth going for this over a one-off license.

It does the full microsoft thing, so that’s good, but what a pain to get into more than one device account! About 6 hours later I’ve actually given up jumping though the hoops needed to put this on my home laptop (as well as the wife’s) and I’ll drag my work laptop around every day instead. Probably great if you are an IT consultant (‘m not). I won’t be renewing it, I’ll tell you that, because life is too short to work out how to enable something so counter-intuitive. I don’t even care if that’s not a word, but I think it is. I’d run it through the spell-checker in MS word to check, if I could get it working…