Microsoft Announces Office 365 Home And Personal Install Limits Will Be Lifted

It's not uncommon for people to work with multiple electronic devices these days. You might have a laptop for work, a laptop for personal use, a desktop at home, and a tablet for yourself and several devices for other family members. Lots of devices are common, and this posed a problem for some people when it came to subscribing to Microsoft Office 365. Originally Office 365 was device-limited depending on the subscription you went with. Office 365 Home was limited to ten devices total with five users able to access Office while Office 365 Personal had a limit to one PC or Mac and one tablet for one user.

Microsoft has announced a big change coming on October 2 that will impact usefulness of an Office 365 subscription. On that date, users can install Office 365 on an unlimited number of devices. That means you can install the Office suite on any number of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. There is a limit to how many people can use Office 365 Home at once right now. Office 365 Home currently allows five users to be logged in at once and Starting on October 2, that plan will get one additional license bringing the number of simultaneous users to six.

Microsoft notes that all six of those Home users will be able to access Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote along with 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage each. Office 365 Home is also integrated more deeply into Microsoft family service so one subscription will share with people listed as family members. Microsoft says that with the Office 365 Home subscription if too many users try to sign into the Office suite, they will see a message that says "limit reached."

If that additional user needs access, they can use any web browser to access the Microsoft account, installs page and sign out of a device not in use. The difference between Office 365 Home and Personal will continue to be the number of people who can sign into the devices. The big change in Office Personal would be that you can have the suite installed on any number of devices you want, but only one person can sign in at a time. The rub with these changes for anyone who subscribed before Microsoft announced this change is that many users (myself included) signed up for Office 365 Home rather than Personal to be able to get Office 365 on all their devices rather than only on one laptop or desktop.

Office 365 Personal will still cost the same $69.99 for a year or $6.99 monthly; Office 365 Home costs $99.99 per year for up to six users under the new terms. That means single users who only bought Home to be able to get access for themselves on a desktop at home, a laptop on the go, and a tablet for occasional use spent an extra $30 that will be unnecessary the next time their plan renews. This is important to point out because if you don't change your plan before renewal, you will be charged for the same plan again. Users can now manage their Office 365 subscription directly from the Microsoft Account portal. Current subscribers have to do nothing for the new changes to go into effect other than wait for October 2 to roll around.

Microsoft gave Office 365 a Fluent design upgrade earlier this summer.