You have to extend your free trial period before it expires, however - if you let your free trial expire, you can’t extend it further. You can also use a hidden trick to extend your free trial period and gain more time. Unlike the standard Office 365 Home Premium trial, this free trial doesn’t require any payment information.
Microsoft also offers a free 60-day trial of Office Professional Plus 2013.
RELATED: How to Extend Your Office 2013/365 Trial to 180 Days Office Professional Plus Trial – 60+ days You’ll have to cancel your service before the free month ends or Microsoft will start charging you $9.99 per month. The only downside here is you’ll have to provide payment details at the time of download. Microsoft offers a free month of Office 365 Home Premium, which allows you to use Office on multiple PCs and Macs.
In the meantime, if you’d like to check out the software for yourself, you can download Office 2013 Customer Preview here.RELATED: What's the Difference Between Office 365 and Office 2016? You can read our first-week impressions of the tablet, laptop, and desktop versions, and we’ll follow that up soon with a comparison of these programs to some other cloud-based offerings. PCWorld editors have been using this early release of Microsoft’s new software for the past week. Office 2013 and Office 365 might raise the bar in some areas but by excluding Windows XP and Windows Vista users, Microsoft also opens a door that might allow its competitors to gain market share. Microsoft faces increasing pressure from rival cloud-based productivity suites such as Google Docs and open-source suites such as LibreOffice. A recent USA Today article explained the importance of the Office franchise to Microsoft: The publication reports that Office revenues “accounted for $22.2 billion of Microsoft’s nearly $70 billion in fiscal 2011 revenue and $14.1 billion of operating income, by far the most of any unit.” The division reported revenues of $4.57 billion for the quarter, a 9 percent increase over the same quarter last year. Microsoft outperformed Wall Street expectations in its third quarter, thanks in part to the performance of its Microsoft Business Division, which is responsible for the company’s Office products. Microsoft’s decision to abandon its tradition of maintaining almost perpetual backward compatibility–which it also did in the case of Internet Explorer 9–continues: The new Office 2013 and Office 365 applications will work only with Windows 7 and Windows 8.
Microsoft has also indicated that Windows RT tablets will come loaded with Office 2013 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The new offerings from Microsoft include Office 2013 and an updated version of Microsoft’s Web-based Office 365. This will enable users to store their files in the cloud, where the files can sync with and be opened from virtually any platform that has Internet access. Microsoft intends to steer users of both versions toward its SkyDrive cloud-storage service by encouraging them to sign in with a Microsoft Live account. The final version of Office 365 will also include Office for Mac.
Subscribers will be entitled to download and install Office 2013 on up to five devices, including PCs and tablets running Windows 7 and Windows 8. But Microsoft also plans to market its Office 365 subscription service to both consumers and businesses. Word retains its Ribbon, but it can be hidden.As it has done in the past, Microsoft will offer consumers and businesses several disc versions of Office 2013 that can be installed locally on a computer. Each component of the suite–Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and the rest–has received new features. The now-familiar ribbon interface is carried over from the previous generation of Office, but you can hide it from view to maximize the screen real estate available on smaller displays.
Microsoft has changed features and conventions big and small in the revamped suite, with the stated goal of streamlining productivity and embracing mobility. Like Windows 8, both Office 2013 and its cloud-based cousin, Office 365, represent a significant departure from their predecessors.
The company’s next-generation office suite looks to be tightly focused on mobile devices, touchscreens, and the cloud. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announces Microsoft 2013 in San Francisco.Microsoft launched its “customer preview” version of Office 2013 and a revamped Office 365 at a media event in San Francisco today.