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Tom’s Tech Tips

Tom’s Tech Tip: Should Certified Legal Nurse Consultants Purchase Office 365?

One of my favorite CLNC® amigos asked me whether or not she should purchase Microsoft® Office 365 for her Mac. Another Certified Legal Nurse Consultant asked me the same question about the Office apps for her iPad®. Even though they are two different questions, I thought I’d address them both here.

Let’s start with the iPads since I have addressed them previously. Office apps for iPads and iPhones® have been around for some time. The free version of Office includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but here’s the catch, unless you register or create a free Office 365 account, it only gives you the ability to view (read) and share the documents you’ll receive as part of your legal nurse consulting business. You can copy content but cannot create or edit documents. To write legal nurse consulting reports you’ll need to create an Office 365 account. What you do is up to you. If you’re going to be creating content on your iPad (or Android® tablet and computer too), buy an Office 365 subscription. You can review the different plans here, but I recommend Personal or Home depending upon how many installations a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant will want or need. They will give you cloud-based storage for your documents on OneDrive® that you can access from any device.

Now, let’s get to the sticky question. Office 365 is software as a service (SaaS) – meaning you lease it without truly buying it – whether it’s for PC or Mac®. Leasing it means that you’ll lose the ability to edit your documents (even locally stored ones) if you let that subscription drop – you can view them as “read only” but not edit. One of the benefits of Office 365 is the OneDrive cloud storage which lets you access your documents from anywhere, but I prefer to keep my documents on my hard drive (truly not the best idea if there’s a hard drive failure) and recommend that every legal nurse consultant do the same if you’re purchasing the subscription version of Office 365. That way, if or when, your subscription expires you can open a “read only” version of your locally-stored document, copy it and paste it into another document for editing (or use an earlier version of Word to edit). So once you subscribe, you’re a subscriber for life with all the ancillary benefits – such as free updates, most current versions, etc. The good news is that it works online and offline – until the deadline.

If you choose not to go the SaaS route in your legal nurse consulting business you can still buy a stand-alone version of Office 2016 for PC or Mac that you can use online, offline or wherever. But according to Microsoft’s website, this program is a one-time purchase that doesn’t upgrade (a lot of software allows 1-year upgrades but not this one) and doesn’t mention security updates. But, at least with this version you own the software for life.

As always, software has issues and every Certified Legal Nurse Consultant should read the reviews before purchasing. At the end of the day, WWTTTD (What would Thomas Tech Tip do)? I’d say stay on your older version as long as you can – then only upgrade when it’s absolutely, positively necessary – like when you buy a new computer and move to Windows® 10.

Keep on Techin’,

Tom

P.S. Comment and share your experiences with Office 365.

One thought on “Tom’s Tech Tip: Should Certified Legal Nurse Consultants Purchase Office 365?

  1. Thanks, Tom! That was a great explanation and good advice. I have decided to keep my 2011 version until it is not supported any longer, and deal with an upgrade at that time. I don’t want my files held hostage in the cloud. Not having my files on my hard drive is not an option.
    Thanks again for keeping us informed!
    One of your favorite amigos, Jane

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*The opinions and statements made by Vickie Milazzo, the founder of Medical-Legal Consulting Institute, Inc. are based on her experiences and expertise, should not be applied beyond the specific context provided, and do not guaranty or project actual results. Vickie Milazzo is no longer involved in the operations or management of the business, but is involved as an independent education consultant.

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