Microsoft have announced that from the 2nd of October 2018, they will increase the sharing limits for Office 365. Currently you can share your Office Home subscription with up to 5 people. From the 2nd of October this limit will increase to up to 6 people.
Each person will be able to install Office on all their devices and be signed into five at the same time. That means they can use Office no matter where they are or what device they’re on. Each person will continue to get all the benefits, including premium versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage and more.
This is particularly good news for small businesses who work from home and need to share their Office applications with multiple people. Whilst it’s intended to be a home product, self employed people will generally use this type of license rather than a business license.
Microsoft Office 365 Products affected
- Home
- Personal
- University
- Home Military Appreciation Edition
- Home Trial
- Personal Trial
If you attempt to sign in to a 6th device yon your subscription, you’ll see a “limit reached” message and will need to sign out of another device before you can sign in.
Office 365 will periodically prompt you to sign in. After you sign in, Office 365 remembers your account and keeps you signed in. Office 365 also works without an Internet connection for 30 days. You’ll see warnings if you haven’t connected in for a while. After 30 days, applications will run in read-only mode. To enable editing you’ll need to connect the device to the Internet.
You can manage your Office 365 subscription on the Microsoft account, Overview page. Here, you can share or unshare your subscription and activate or deactivate devices which you use Office 365 on.
