If you're looking to purchase Microsoft Office for your business, you've got plenty of options. But understanding difference between the options - most notably between Office 2016 and Office 365 - can be confusing.

The short version: Office 2016 is a version of the Office productivity suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc), typically accessed via the desktop. Office 365 is a cloud-based subscription to a suite of programs including Office 2016. This means you have a few options for purchasing Office 2016: a stand-alone product or as part of an Office 365 subscription.

(Update 10/1/2018: Office 2019 is now available for purchase. The below post is still true, but there are more differences between Office 2019 and Office 365 ProPlus (the version of Office included in Office 265) than in previous releases of Office. You can compare features here.)
Here's what you get what you get with each option (please note: this focuses specifically on Office 365 business and enterprise plans):

Stand Alone Office 2016

There are two stand-alone versions available for businesses:

Office Home & Business 2016

Includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook) for $229.99 for 1 PC (or Mac – Mac users must purchase Office Home & Business 2016 for Mac)

Office Professional 2016

Includes everything in Home & Business 2016 plus Publisher and Access for $399.99 for 1 PC (not compatible with Mac)

The stand-alone versions include the ability to save your files to the cloud, which makes collaboration easier – especially among teams not working in the same physical location.

Office 2016 as part of Office 365

If you purchase Office 2016 as part of an Office 365 plan, you have a lot more options for plans and a lot more features.

ALL Office 365 plans include:

• Online versions of Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel)
• 1 TB per user of file storage and sharing (OneDrive)
• Sway presentation creator (learn the differences between Sway and PowerPoint in this blog post)
• 99% uptime guaranteed
• World-class data security
• Active Directory integration to make user permissions

As you go up in Office 365 plans, features you can get in addition to the above include:

• Full desktop versions of Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel plus OneNote and Publisher) on up to 5 computers per user
• Office on tablet or mobile (compatible with most tablets and phones regardless of OS)
• Outlook with 50 GB of inbox space per user
• SharePoint (customizable intranet)
• Skype for Business instant messenger (can also be used as your phone system)
• Yammer (corporate social network)
• Compliance Protection (Encrypted Email, Data Loss Prevention, etc)

Which is right for me? Factors to consider:

There are few things to consider when deciding which version of Office 2016 or Office 365 is right for you:

Desired programs and features

Take a good look at what programs and features are important to you. If you just need the basic Office programs like Word, PowerPoint and Excel, either a stand-alone version or a lower level Office 365 plan is probably enough for you. If you’re looking for something more robust, or with access to programs like SharePoint, you’ll need Office 365.

• Office 2016: Stand-alone Office 2016 is the same as previous versions of Office in that you won’t get access to new features until you install a new version of Office. 
• Office 365: Since Office 365 is a subscription service, you’ll get access to new features as they become available. You’re also going to have access to a lot more features.

Accessibility

If you need to access your information from multiple devices, Office 365 is the way to go. While files in Office 2016 can be saved to the cloud, Office 365 gives you a lot more options for access plus the ability to install Office on multiple machines. It also gives you the ability to access online versions of Office programs from ANY device with an internet connection.

Movement between plans

Is it possible you’ll need to upgrade your plan?

• Office 2016: Since Office 2016 is a standalone software, if you need to add features or upgrade, you’ll need to purchase and install new licenses for all users. Keep in mind that Office 2019 will be released sometime in 2018. 
• Office 365: Office 365 users can switch between plans in the admin center at any time.

Price

What can you afford to pay per user? Would you rather pay a large sum up front or a small monthly fee?

• Office 2016: The stand-alone version is a one-time cost per user, so it will be a large expense up front, but you won’t have to pay a monthly fee after.
• Office 365: Office 365 is a subscription plan, meaning you won’t pay anything up front, but you will pay a set monthly fee per user per month. If don’t have the capital to pay a large chunk of change up front, this may be the better option, even if you don’t need all the features.

We get some feedback that their images were blocked in Creativepro Office. We have targeted Google Chrome and figure out the solutions:

Chrome To ensure that images are not being blocked:

1.Click the Chrome menu icon in the upper right-hand corner of the browser.

2.Select Settings.

3.Click "Settings" on the left and then "Show advanced settings" at the bottom of the page.

4.In the Privacy section, click Content Settings.

5.In the Images section, click "Show all images "recommended"). Note: If you do not want to display images from other sites, click "Exceptions" or "Manage Exceptions" and add *constantcontact.com.

6. In the "Flash", under Allow: put http://mycpohq.com or https://secure.mycpohq.com as allow list.

6.Click Done.

For additional assistance with images in Chrome, please see Google Support

We have got some questions regarding SSL connection. Yes, we are using SHA-2 SSL connection. We set it as an option for our customers. The URL for non SSL is http://www.mycpohq.com. The URL for SSL connection is https://secure.mycpohq.com. You are welcome to use SSL connection: https://secure.mycpohq.com to do any operations and data transactions.

As a new customer as well, we have tried different internet browser to access www.mycpohq.com. We have tried: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome etc.  The best internet browser works for us on www.mycpohq.com is Google Chrome. We also queried the system administrators and it seems that 60% of mycpohq.com customers using Chrome, 20% of customers using Firefox, 10% of customers using Safari.  Would like to share this information with all of you.  

Happy Valentine's Day 

Last week we rolled out a whole bunch of updates to CreativePro Office.  Among them were things like updated jQuery UI controls, new messaging widget, drag and drop file uploads for tasks and messages, and a highly requested feature...estimates!

Now you can create and send estimates to your clients and then convert them to invoices with one click.  Estimates are created exactly the same way as invoices and they show up in the Finances area under the Invoices and Estimates tab.

The other big new feature is the ledger view.  Until now, there was no way to view income and expenses in a single view.  In the ledger view, you can select a date range and see all invoice payments and expenses within that range.  You can expand each item to see a little bit more detail. Invoice payments will show all payments made for that particular invoice, along with the date of payment and the method of payment.  Expenses will show any notes or comments associated with the expense.

In the right-hand column, you can see income and expense totals for the time period selected. You can also toggle between viewing only expenses or income.

We hope you like the new estimate and ledger features as we keep working to make CPO a more complete solution for your team!

Thanks for reading.

Just a quick update on some of the new stuff we've been doing around here the past few weeks. Possibly THE most requested feature for CPO has been the ability to create estimates. So, we're finally going to make that happen.  But as we were building out the estimate feature, we went ahead and decided to do a whole bunch of good stuff in the Finances area.  Here's a quick list of things you'll see within the next 2 weeks:

1. Estimates and the ability to turn an estimate into an invoice with one click *Yea!*
2. A ledger view with Income and Expenses will be the default view for the Finances area.
3. You'll be able to filter the ledger by date range or keyword search.
4. The PayPal link on invoices will now be optional.  You can chose whether or not to include it when you email the invoice.
5. We'll make the invoice HTML and Email views a bit more readable.
6. We'll fix that pesky invoice Due Date bug.

We're also making a few app-wide changes - mostly to the code and UI.  We've replaced a lot of CSS code to make our button HTML smaller and easier to implement.  Category entry select controls in Projects, Invoices, and Expenses are now jQuery combo boxes and they work very nicely.  All autocomplete controls have been replaced with jQuery UI autocomplete. And we're now minifying and concatenating all our CSS and JavaScript files on the server so you should see some slightly faster load times.

I think that's about it.  We hope to have all of these updates rolled out by mid-October. Thanks for reading!

Some good news for your weekend.  Today we bumped the storage space on all CreativePro Office accounts by a whopping 10x!  That means that the SOLO plan now has 10GB or storage space.  The SHOP plan has 50GB, and the TEAM plan has a stupendous 100GB of storage space.  

The best part...this increase is completely free to all customers.  It's one way we can say a big "Thanks!" to all of our loyal users.  So go - upload your documents, photos, comps, and proposals. Hopefully, worries about running out of space will now be the last thing on your mind.

Have a great weekend, everyone and thanks for reading.

Until now, there hasn't been an easy way to change the date of a timesheet entry. If you accidentally entered time on the wrong day, you had to delete the entry and enter it again on the correct date.  We added a little feature last week that lets you change the date on a timesheet entry with just a couple of clicks.  Watch the quick tutorial below to find out how.

We made it really easy to change folder names in the file manager today.  Check out the quick video below to see how it's done.

We've always felt a little bad about not offering a place where subscribers could see their payment record.  So this week, we've fixed that!  Beginning this week, you will receive email receipts each month for your CPO payments and you can view them within the app as well.

To view your payments, you'll need to go into the My Account area which is new.

You'll notice that we've moved some stuff into the My Account area that used to be under Settings like changing you password, cancelling your account, and changing your credit card or plan type.

To see your list of payments, click on the View Account Payments tab.

Here you'll see an entry for each payment you've made since May 2012 - unfortunately, we couldn't get data for any payments made prior to May. The Profile ID is a unique ID assigned to your subscription by our payment processor.  It will change if you update your credit card or change plans and it's handy to have on hand if there's ever a payment dispute.

Right now, this is a simple list view.  Eventually, we'd like to give you the ability to print or email your payment data from this screen.

Thanks for reading!