How to get premium access to your daily office tools

With the rapid growth of technology and the need for swift services, corporate houses are trying to reduce the usage of files and papers. 

They are trying to organise everything in one central space and this is where packaged office tools come in handy. They are easier to access and do not occupy any physical space.

Currently, there are two big giants, Microsoft and Google, who provide a big portion of the tech services. 

They come at different prices and with varieties of products. There are also specialised packaged software for those who work in the creative field and tech geeks. 

We have picked out some of the best packages for your work along with their prices.

Product: Microsoft 365

Where to buy: www.microsoft.com

Price: Tk200-1,700 (approx) / monthly

Microsoft 365 programmes are recognisable to many PC users. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are three of the most well-known applications, and they are used frequently in most of the offices. 

Microsoft 365 allows cloud-based software solutions. This makes working on the move a lot easier, and it turns classic office apps into sophisticated collaborative tools.

There are three kinds of Microsoft 365 business packages. The business basic pack is $2.5 (approx Tk213), the business standard pack is $10 (approx Tk854), and the business premium pack is about $20 (approx Tk1700). All these packages are offered under a user/month scheme. 

Every office suite service Microsoft offers, including Intune and Azure Information Protection, is included in the business premium bundle. It also comes with 1TB of cloud storage through OneDrive and a video conferencing tool called Microsoft Teams, which can accommodate up to 300 people.

The business basic package is precisely what it says on the label. It comes with only the most basic office applications, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The good news is that it supports video calling as well as cloud sharing.

After all, it is not that straightforward. 

Product: Google workspace 

Where to Buy: worskspace.google.com

Price: Tk500-1,500 (approx) / monthly

From early 2006, Google started providing more than its search engine. Its product line included office solutions from the beginning. 

Google was one of the first companies to offer spreadsheets, word processing, and the ability to make presentations through a browser-based online application. 

Meanwhile, it has developed a comprehensive suite that is totally cloud-based by combining Gmail and Google Drive, the standalone apps.

Starter at $6 (approx Tk500), Standard at $12 (approx Tk1,000), and Plus at $18 (approx Tk1,500) are the three parts of the Google business pack. Again, these services are offered under a user/month scheme. 

Each of the three packages offers a unique set of benefits. For example, with Google Meet, you can have a video chat with up to 100 individuals in the beginning version, but in the Standard and Plus versions, you may have up to 150 and 250 people.

Google provides 30 GB of cloud storage per user in the beginning plan, 2TB in the Standard package, and 5TB in the Plus package, but Microsoft provides 1TB regardless of package.

Other than that, you receive the same Google documents, presentations, forms, and other Google workplace tools.

For those in the creative field

Product: Adobe All Apps package

Where to Buy: www.adobe.com/creativecloud

Price: Tk4,500 (approx) / monthly

People who are in charge of the creative department use various tools to showcase their creativity. This is where Adobe creative cloud comes in handy. 

To be accurate there are not any products that provide this much option while maintaining professional quality. 

Adobe provides a bunch of products for photography (Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop), design (Adobe Illustrator), video editing(Adobe Premiere pro), and many more. 

Adobe offers various price packages for their products but the best pricing is where they provide all the apps such as Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, and many more including the mobile apps. 

If you subscribe to the annual plan you have to pay $52.99/month (approx Tk4,500) or you can pay the whole price which is $522.99/year (approx Tk44,000).

If you do not want to subscribe to the annual package, you have to pay $72.99/month (approx Tk7,200) but the subscription ends after 30 days. 

So it is wise to subscribe to the annual price package. The package includes 100GB of cloud storage, adobe fonts, and other extra services adobe provides. 

For tech gurus 

Product: Microsoft Azure Cloud services

Where to buy: azure.microsoft.com 

Price: Tk5,000 (minimum) / monthly

Office spaces use various tools to maintain the technical parts. Some cloud computing services are there to take off the burden of physical bulky servers and give you relentless cloud hosting and advanced cloud computing services. 

Microsoft Azure is a prominent cloud computing service provider. Fun fact, cloud computing is the biggest revenue source of Microsoft. This clearly means that they are providing some good-quality services.

The prices for Azure products vary depending on the configuration of the product and configuring them can be a tricky thing to do, just to give you an example. 

For 10 VMs, serverless functions with five million executions per day, and 200 GB storage it will cost you around $62 (approx Tk5,000) monthly. 

There are more options you can just go on their website and configure the service you want and it will be able to see the price using the price calculator. 

How do you pay? 

You have to have a working credit card (Visa/Mastercard)  to use these services. As an alternative, you can contact some Facebook pages like UML, ZeroDigits, CityX, Digital Tools Sp, and many others like them. 

They take mobile banking payments which makes the process a bit easy if you do not have a credit card. You can also check the websites to know more about pricing and find out what works the best for you.