Office 365 Home Premium Arrives in 162 Regions, in 21 Languages

Today, Microsoft made available a reinvented flavor of its Office Suite, in the form of the Office 365 Home Premium, which comes to customers as a cloud service aimed at enabling end users to take their work at home when needed.

While Office 365 Home Premium arrives as a different offer when compared to previous flavors of Office, it does include the entire set of applications that people were used to seeing inside the productivity suite.

Furthermore, it arrives with support for various devices, including Windows tablets, PCs and Macs. Available with a yearly subscription of US$99.99 (which equals US$8.34 per month), the suite can be used on up to five devices at the same time.

“Today’s launch of Office 365 Home Premium marks the next big step in Microsoft’s transformation to a devices and services business,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.

“This is so much more than just another release of Office. This is Office reinvented as a consumer cloud service with all the full-featured Office applications people know and love, together with impressive new cloud and social benefits.”

The Redmond-based software giant also announced that the service was available in no less than 162 markets at launch, and that it also offered support for 21 languages right from the start.

Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access have been included in the package, along with an additional 20 GB of SkyDrive cloud storage and 60 free Skype world calling minutes per month.

Office 365 Home Premium is accompanied by the new Office 2013 suite, which was made available for purchase several hours ago, with price tags starting at $139.99, as reported earlier.

Furthermore, the company also announced the availability of Office 365 University for college or university students, which features a price tag of US$79.99 for a four-year subscription (about US$1.67 per month).

According to Microsoft, Office 365 will become available for businesses as well, though it will be released globally only at the end of the next month, on February 27.

Additional info on the new Office 365 Home Premium can be found on Microsoft’s revamped Office.com website. Office 2013 (along with previous flavors of the application) can be downloaded from Softpedia as well, via this link.