Questions about Office 365 - Info Appreciated

In My Humble Opinion
1

I am about to get a new touchscreen laptop running Windows 8, and I want to upgrade to the latest Office. I have a couple of minor concerns about Office 365, and online research is giving me conflicting or confusing answers.

(For a quick overview, I am a teacher and typically alternate between my work laptop and home laptop. I use Dropbox for file storage and to transfer seamlessly from one laptop to the other.)

  1. Can Office365 be used offline? I am moving to Costa Rica in July, and I’m not sure about the reliability of home Internet (the school’s Internet is supposed to be robust). I do most of my lecture notes and presentations at home, so I need to have access to Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote in times when I might not have Internet access.

  2. Can I save my files to Dropbox instead of using Skydrive? I upgraded to the Pro version of Dropbox, so I already have 100GB of storage, compared to only 20GB with Skydrive. I would rather have all of my documents on Dropbox but am not sure if Office 365 gives me a choice on where to save documents. I really don’t want to have to mess with two different cloud storage locations.

If anyone has experience with this, your advice is much appreciated!

2

IIRC, you can save files on your computer, which means you can also save them into Dropbox, which acts like a folder on your computer (actually, it is a folder on your computer, but the folder is synced with the Dropbox server.

3

Office365 is not really the latest Office. It’s a new product, and, yes, it is online-only. What you are looking for is Office 2013. (Or Office 2013 RT if you are on a ARM-based tablet).