Discover the Top 6 Benefits of Investing in a Microsoft 365 Membership

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• More OneDrive Storage Space
• Unlimited Use of the Personal Vault
• Create Templates for Formatting Consistency
• More Sophisticated Tools
• Offline Access and Local Saving
• Technical Support
• What Are My Subscription Options?

Yes, you can get most of Microsoft’s programs through 365 for the web, and Google’s suite offers a decent alternative. But if you’re looking for more storage, security, flexibility, sophistication, and tech support, it’s totally worth paying for the Microsoft 365 subscription.

I’m going to run through the perks of the Microsoft 365 Personal plan, but there are other subscription packages for you to choose from.

More OneDrive Storage Space

Compared to the free Microsoft account, which gives you 5 GB of OneDrive storage, and the Microsoft Basic account with 100 GB, the Microsoft 365 Personal plan comes with 1 TB of cloud space. It’s unlikely you’ll ever fill 1 TB of storage as a personal user, even if you upload high resolution photos, your music collection, and other large files, but you can quickly run out with just 5 GB or 100 GB.

Provided you’ve signed in to your Microsoft subscription account and activated automatic backup, your files and photos will automatically sync to OneDrive . You can rest assured they’re stored for you to access and edit from wherever you like on whichever device you’re using.

As there’s so much OneDrive storage space with the Personal plan, you don’t need to use other programs to rely on your storage. Importantly, though, I would always recommend that you back up your most important files manually to multiple places anyway, as automated tools can’t always be trusted. But it’s just nice to know that you don’t have to worry about your OneDrive storage filling up.

I’d argue that the majority of the Microsoft 365 subscription fee is for the use of the many powerful desktop apps, so I view the 1 TB of storage as a free add-on to my subscription.

Unlimited Use of the Personal Vault

OneDrive’s Personal Vault is a great place for storing sensitive information—such as a scan of your passport, driver’s license, or birth certificate—with an extra layer of protection. Once you’ve set up your Vault, you can access it through your fingerprint, facial recognition, or an additional passcode, and your Personal Vault locks after a period of inactivity.

This secure feature is only available to people who have subscribed to the Basic, Personal, or Family plan—you can’t get it for free.

As a Personal plan subscriber, I can upload an unlimited number of sensitive documents to my Personal Vault (you can only add three files if you’re a Basic subscriber). So, as well as those mentioned above, I also save my essential passwords, tax documents, and self-employed contracts to my encrypted storage area, ensuring they’re deleted from my regular OneDrive folders to give me that extra peace of mind.

Create Templates for Formatting Consistency

The Microsoft 365 apps, including Word, Excel, OneNote, and Loop, all let you save a file as a template . In other words, if you like to use certain fonts, layouts, or formatting, you can set these up as a template for easy use each time you open the program.

This can be useful even if you’re not keen on the Microsoft 365 default font , or if you know that you’re likely to use the same multi-level list formatting in many of your Word documents.

While Microsoft 365 for the web gives you access to thousands of pre-made templates, you can’t create and save your own using this platform—this feature is only available on the desktop app. Rather than having to set up your layout every time you open the Microsoft 365 program, you can save so much time by deferring to one of your pre-saved templates, especially handy if—like me—you work for various clients who have different style guides, or run a business and want all your letters to look the same.

More Sophisticated Tools

While Microsoft’s free online version of the 365 suite is always improving , the desktop versions of the apps are much more powerful and host many more features than their web counterparts. I feel the benefits of this when I want to personalize my documents, as I know I can use the many tools available to make them perform and look exactly how I want them to.

For example, on Microsoft Word, you’ll need the desktop app to add or amend watermarks, create document-specific macros, add section breaks, or insert a caption to an image. Even a quick glance at the ribbon (which you can’t modify online like you can in the paid apps) reveals the difference in the options available:

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And the same applies to the other Microsoft 365 desktop apps when you compare them to the free online versions.

Subscribing to Microsoft 365 Personal also means I know I’ll always have the latest features, fixes, and security updates—so, all things considered, I have no qualms about paying the annual fee for unlimited use of these excellent tools. Admittedly, making full use of these tools can take time to get used to, and if you’re running Microsoft 365 programs on a lower-end PC, they can take a bit more time to process. But these are only minor drawbacks that shouldn’t pose any real user issues.

Offline Access and Local Saving

I’m old-school—I like to have my files saved locally on my PC, and keep current documents on my desktop so that I can access them instantly as soon as I log on to my computer. It’s great that files save automatically to my OneDrive folder, as I sometimes like to view them on my phone, but saving them locally also gives me extra assurance that they won’t be lost in the cloud.

Even more importantly, I know that if my internet drops off for whatever reason, or if I’m working on my PC in a remote place (which I often do when I’m on vacation in the middle of nowhere), I can still open and edit my work.

Subscribing to Microsoft 365 Personal means that I can have the apps on my computer for me to use whenever and wherever I want, as long as I have my computer with me.

Technical Support

Whether you need help with a Microsoft 365 app-related problem or simply want to know how to amend your tabIe of contents on Word, having a Microsoft 365 account gives you 24/7 access to the Microsoft tech gurus via the online chat facility, or you can request a callback.

I’ve personally used Microsoft’s technical support for help generating a complex Excel formula, and the online support facility meant that I could keep the chat open in my internet browser while playing around with my Excel spreadsheet in a separate window. What’s more, if your problem is particularly complex, the guru will ask you to share your screen, so they can try to fix the issue remotely.

If you have an older one-time subscription to Office 2016, 2019, or 2021, you do have access to the chat service, but you can’t request a callback, unless you’re having problems with activation. So, subscribing to Microsoft 365 means that you have the best support options out there.

To date, each time I’ve contacted Microsoft’s technical support team, my requests have been addressed almost immediately, and I’ve always come away with a solution to my queries.

What Are My Subscription Options?

Microsoft offers four options for personal users:

• A Microsoft account—If you don’t want to pay a penny, you can access Microsoft 365 for the web (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and OneDrive), Skype, Outlook online, and Xbox free of charge by signing up to Microsoft with a valid email address . You also get 5 GB of OneDrive storage and 15 GB of mail storage.
• Microsoft Basic—At $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year, you can subscribe to Microsoft Basic, which gives you 95 GB more OneDrive storage space and 35 MB more mail storage space than the free Microsoft account, but you still don’t have access to the Microsoft 365 desktop apps. You can also add three files to a secure Personal Vault, and you have access to Microsoft’s technical support experts through the online chat facility or a callback.
• Microsoft 365 Personal—The jump from the Basic subscription to the Personal subscription is quite sizable, both in terms of price and what you get for your money. For $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year, you can sign in to five devices at the same time, get 1 TB of OneDrive storage and 50 GB of mail storage, have unlimited use of the Personal Vault, and use all the Microsoft 365 apps on your desktop and other devices, on top of the perks offered by the Basic plan.
• Microsoft 365 Family—This is the same as the Personal plan, but you get 6 TB of storage to accommodate its six-user capacity. For this subscription, you pay $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year.

There are also four business subscription options , which you can choose from depending on the size of your organization.

Though the $69.99 yearly cost might initially seem a little steep, you could make your payments more manageable by opting for the monthly price plan. Ultimately, I think that what you get for this subscription absolutely justifies the price. In fact (and please don’t tell Microsoft this!), I’d even be happy to pay a little more.