If you have two systems and want to run Office 2011 on both, youll have to fork over an extra 80 (for the Home and Business Multi-Pack) or 30 (for the Home and Student Family-Pack).

Office Home And Business 2011 License Home And

Buying in this case means shelling out 200 for the single-license Home and Business Edition (which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Messenger) or 280 for the Multi-Pack; the Home and Student Edition (which omits Outlook) will retail for 120 for a single license, 150 for a three-install Family Pack.

Theres no special upgrade pricing, unless you bought Office 2008 after August 1, 2010, in which case you can upgrade for free.

Based on what Ive seen of the new Office so far, and on input from our reviewers, heres how Id sort out that buying decision.

Office Home And Business 2011 Full Of Windows

The cross-platform Office If youre in an office full of Windows users, or if you frequently collaborate with them, upgrading to Office 2011 is really a no-brainer: Youve got to do it.

Start with the suites powerful co-editing tools: You and your co-workers or clients can all edit Office documents at the same time, regardless of whether youre using the Windows or Mac version.

Theres also better file compatibility: Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations created on one platform should open perfectly on the other.

More significantly, now that Visual Basic for Applications is back on the Mac, you can feel confident that macros you create on your Mac will work fine for anyone else, regardless of their machine.

Note: Were continuing to test cross-platform compatibility; well let you know what we find as soon as we can.) My only hesitation in recommending Office 2011 whole-heartedly for business users: The licensing terms for the Home and Business edition, which prohibit you from installing the suite on more than one machine unless you buy the Multi-Pack, arent great.

Upgrading from 2008 (or before) The should-I-or-shouldnt-I-buy question is almost as easy to answer for anyone who owns an earlier version of Office: Assuming the price is no barrier, Office 2011 has enough new features to make the investment make great sense.

In addition to the Windows compatibility I extolled above, theres also.

It makes commonly used tools easily accessible, and (if you dont like it) is easily and completely removable.

Who shouldnt buy Office 2011 All that said, theres one big group of users who can probably ignore Office 2011: those who currently use, and are perfectly content with Apples 79 iWork suite, the free Google Docs, or some other Office alternative.

Sure, if you use Google Docs primarily because it makes your documents available from any computer, you might consider using Office 2011 in conjunction with SkyDrive or SharePoint.

Or if you like Google Docs collaboration tools, you might also consider switching to Office 2011, now that it can do co-editing.

Probably most persuasively, you might sometimes get files from Office users that you cant work with in another suite.

As one of our reviewers put it, Sometimes you just need Office.

But otherwise, if youre happy with whatever youre using now, Office 2011 isnt a must-have.

Watch out for licensing gotchas I have just one major caveat in recommending Office 2011: the new licensing system.

Microsoft has done this in order to protect itself against piracy.

The problem is, the change will heavily impact legitimate Office users.

Do you work on a desktop computer at the office, but use a laptop when youre traveling Previously, you could install Office on both your systems and then move freely from one to the other, as long as you didnt use both at the same time.

With Office 2011, however, a single-license version of the suite will only work on a single computer.

Office For Mac Home And Business 2011