About
The guy family called when they were buying Office
Hi, I'm Matt. For years I worked at Microsoft, which made me the default tech support line for my entire family. Many times the question was the same: which version of Office should I get? And sometimes it was for a Mac, where my standard answer fell apart. Different products, different prices, different rules.
After walking parents, friends, and their college kids through the same Mac-shaped decision enough times (no, you don't need to pay every year to write a document; yes, students can usually get it free; no, don't buy a license key from that site), I wrote it all down properly. That became the buyer's guide, and the guide became this site. Now instead of helping one household at a time, the same advice is here for any family staring down the Office-for-Mac decision.
What you'll get here
- Mac-first advice, informed by years inside Microsoft. Not Windows advice with the screenshots swapped.
- Verified prices. Every number is checked against Microsoft's own pages, and the verification date is stamped on the money pages.
- Honesty about when not to buy. Our most common recommendation is the cheaper one-time purchase, and for students it's often "pay nothing."
How we support this site
Some links here are affiliate links. If you buy through them, a retailer may pay us a small commission at no extra cost to you. That's the entire business model. It doesn't change the advice: we routinely recommend the cheapest suitable option, including free school access, because recommendations you can't trust aren't worth anything (to you or to us).
Get in touch
Found a better deal we should know about? Spotted a Microsoft product change before we did? That's exactly the email we want: contact@officeformacs.com or the contact page. Good tips make the site better for the next family.