The new subscriptions are priced at the same rate as Office 365 Personal and Office 365 Home. Microsoft 365 Personal is available for R899 per year and can be used by one person, and Microsoft 365 Family is priced at R1,199 per year with support for up to six users.

Each of these products offers 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage per user, as well as access to the full suite of Office applications. Office Home and Student 2019 is still available from the Microsoft website, priced at R1,999 for a one-time purchase.

Microsoft 365 also brings a number of new features to the Office suite of apps, including an AI-powered Editor feature for Word and Outlook. This tool automatically checks for spelling and grammatical errors as well as offering suggestions to improve the clarity of your writing.

Microsoft will also launch a new Family Safety App in the near future, which will allow parents to monitor their children’s screen time across devices. “On the horizon, we have even more exciting news to debut,” Microsoft said. “Money in Excel will soon allow you to manage, track, and analyze all your money and spending in a single place. “Also, in Excel, you will be able to make sense of your data with informative and interactive visualizations of everything from food to movies to Pokémon.”

The company said that additional benefits would be added to the Microsoft 365 subscriptions over time, including new features for the consumer version of Microsoft Teams. Microsoft 365 products are available to purchase from the Microsoft website. For users who are unable to purchase a Microsoft 365 subscription but would still like access to Office applications, Microsoft offers free web versions of a number of its apps, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.