Microsoft now offers a cheaper subscription option to their Office 365 suite. For $69 per year (or $6.99 per month), you can use the full suite of Microsoft Office products including Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and others on 1 computer plus 1 tablet computing device. Their original subscription option which is still available allows the use of the full suite of Office products on 5 computers plus 5 tablets in a household for $99 per year (or $9.99 per month).
Last month Microsoft released a version of Office designed for the iPad. Though the app is free to install, a Microsoft Office subscription is required in order to create or edit files. Oddly the initial release of the app doesn’t have the ability to print but Microsoft says that the feature will be coming in a future release of the app.
Besides a subscription to Office, Microsoft currently offers several versions of Office 2013 with a one-time purchase starting at $139 per computer. Alternatively you can access free simplified web page versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint and OneNote at Office Online. See Get started at Office.com
For more information on the subscription and one-time purchase options see Compare Microsoft Office versions.