Is office 365 subscription required for running W10M MS office apps through continuum?

[iwameed]

Carphone Warehouse has a "How to use Microsoft Continuum for Windows" video on their youtube channel showing the use of continuum through the 950 xl. when the lady opens the word app a dialog box appears. although its not possible to read what it says but somewhere in the comments the video creator says that it was asking for signing into an office 365 account. I know office apps (creating/editing) are free for <10inches screens, but what about running those apps on screens bigger than 10 inches through continuum. any idea if we need office 365 subscription for that?

 

[TexasLabRat]

Carphone Warehouse has a "How to use Microsoft Continuum for Windows" video on their youtube channel showing the use of continuum through the 950 xl. when the lady opens the word app a dialog box appears. although its not possible to read what it says but somewhere in the comments the video creator says that it was asking for signing into an office 365 account. I know office apps (creating/editing) are free for <10inches screens, but what about running those apps on screens bigger than 10 inches through continuum. any idea if we need office 365 subscription for that?

Yeah very good question and I've wondered that myself. From the indirect info I've gathered, I think the answer is "no" it is not needed as the licensing is based on the installed device class, not on the display mode. But having a definitive statement from MS would be nice. Or at least real-world reports once people get phones in their hands and try it

 

[christosays]

I'm currently having the issue where I am signed into my Microsoft account and I have an Office 365 Home subscription but it is still telling me that I need a subscription to use Office applications whenever I use Continuum. It only gives me the option to choose a subscription to purchase, it doesn't allow me to sign-in anywhere (even though I am already signed in with my MSA).

 

[Chris Phelps]

Per my conversation with Microsoft support about 2 weeks ago, the core apps in MS Office (outlook, excel, word, powerpoint, skype) do not require a subscription. According to MS Support, the subscriptions are for add-on apps or the cloud storage that comes with Onedrive.

In the same conversation, he was telling me the reason they killed off the free trial and eliminated the unlimited storage is because they had intended for onedrive to be a platform for sharing work between multiple users, but many of their users were choosing to use the unlimited storage to back up everything on their hard drives (some in excess of 5TB).


So, by that conversation, the answer to the question would be "no, no subscription would be required to use the core apps on any platform... Mobile, Desktop, Continuum, Tablet, etc."

But I should also note my lack of confidence in MS Support staff. My last conversation with them was 5 hours before the display dock went on sale through their site, and he couldn't tell me when it was launching. He had no idea. So there is always that.

 

[Don Geronimo]

I'm currently having the issue where I am signed into my Microsoft account and I have an Office 365 Home subscription but it is still telling me that I need a subscription to use Office applications whenever I use Continuum. It only gives me the option to choose a subscription to purchase, it doesn't allow me to sign-in anywhere (even though I am already signed in with my MSA).

What I did to fix that is I went to Options in Word --> Accounts. I logged out, then logged back in to the saved Microsoft account. It didn't let me edit documents from OneDrive until I did that.