How will the new web-based Office 365 affect my monthly data cap?

January 30, 2013 12:41 PM

I have satellite internet service with a monthly download/upload allowance of 15 GB. I am a heavy Microsoft Office user. With Office 13, apparently there's a web-based subscription option, and it sounds great (5 licenses vs. 1). But will constant communication with the servers eat away at my monthly allowance?

I use Skydrive now, and my documents are automatically backed up. This doesn't burn through much data. But I'm concerned that this subscription service might require a lot more back-and-forth. Honestly, though, I have no idea.

Can someone tell me how this works?

posted by jackypaper to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Best answer: Whats your current Skydrive data usage and how do you use Office?

You should be fine if a) you aren't close to your cap, and b) your cloud backup data usage isn't significant. If you do 99% plain text emails and word documents you dont have to worry at all, the danger like most things data will come depending on how much media/graphics/etc (Word docs with images, OneNote, PowerPoint, Publisher, etc) you use in your office apps. But really, the best way to do it is just try the 10$/mo subscription (rather than the 99/yr) for a month or two and keep an eye on your data. Not much to lose if you prefer the web version. Make sure you only use the download app, don't stream it because then you are essentially continuously re-downloading the program.

As for how this works, these types of cloud services use an incremental changes update feature, so you aren't actually uploading/downloading entire documents every time you make a change for the most part. Plus, using the web apps sync with your Skydrive so you aren't doubling your backup needs - your sending those changes essentially straight to Skydrive. These are Incremental in the sense that it means that its kinda-sorta like the track changes feature you can enable in word - it keeps track of a the changes you make in a document and then periodically sends that list to the cloud, not the whole file. This uses limited data until you make a big change on computer B, and then want to work on it on computer A, which then means that you have to download either the changes or the whole file depending on details, and then Bam - you are downloading that 100mb 1080p video that you know is not supposed to be in your ppt but oh well you said fuck it and put it in anyways. Or say, upload that video, let it sync, and then delete it because you found a new, bigger, better video for example.
posted by McSwaggers at 2:36 PM on January 30, 2013