Visited a site today with a some what distressed client trying to make sense of office.

Someone had been kind enough to load a student copy of Office 2010....  not really very kind to pay a retailer $250 for something that has no value when it's being used in a commerical setting...

The product seemed to be limited in that it had ads in a pane on the right hand side and Excel wouldn't even allow pane freezing.... clearly we need to get them into something else.

But what are the options.

What is Office 365?  I see that it can be purchased on a monthly licence.  But is that all cloud based?  Will anything work if the computer doesn't have an active net connection?

Where is the cloud stuff based?  I know there are latency problems to .sg right now, does that actually impact the software?

Should I be getting them into Office 2013?  Can they purchase that on a month by month licence?

Is there any value in that student licence?  Can it be upgraded from in anyway or is that just wasted money?

They've got 3 computers, all of which need sorting out.  Is there a licence option for this?

If they go the 365 way, does it allow saving the files on the local computer or are the files cloud based as well?