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This Microsoft Office 365 Home deal is actually pretty decent: $55

Today only, you can save $45 on the six-user edition of this popular suite. Plus: Lenovo's 10-inch Smart Display is on sale for a great price.

Rick Broida Senior Editor
Rick Broida is the author of numerous books and thousands of reviews, features and blog posts. He writes CNET's popular Cheapskate blog and co-hosts Protocol 1: A Travelers Podcast (about the TV show Travelers). He lives in Michigan, where he previously owned two escape rooms (chronicled in the ebook "I Was a Middle-Aged Zombie").
Rick Broida
2 min read
microsoft-office-365-home
Microsoft

Cheapskates don't use Microsoft Office . Or, at least, they don't pay for it: Microsoft offers pretty decent freebie versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint that live in your browser.

And let's not forget the various free alternatives, such as Google Docs, LibreOffice and WPS Office.

All that being said, I like a good deal, and this is a good deal. Today only, Amazon is offering a 12-month Office 365 Home subscription for $54.99 -- the lowest price I can ever recall seeing. It normally sells for $100 (though has been selling at $80 for a while).

This version supports up to six users, and they don't all have to be in your house. Each person gets a 1-terabyte  OneDrive cloud account, which is definitely one of the bigger value-adds here.

You also get Publisher, which is one of the few remaining desktop-publishing tools, and Outlook, one of the few remaining full-featured mail clients.

The regular $100 annual price bugs me. I'd really like to see Microsoft drop it to $50 -- but that would be unparalleled, so we have to settle for sales like these.

Your thoughts?

Bonus deal: The Lenovo Smart Display is Lenovo's answer to the Amazon Echo Show : a 10-inch, kitchen-minded smart screen with Google Assistant running the, er, show. CNET rated it 8.6 stars.

lenovo-smart-display-cropped-for-door
CNET

The gizmo lists for $250, but today only, Best Buy has the Lenovo Smart Display for $160.

Designed for things like YouTube videos, video calls, music and the like, the triangular Smart Display is, to my thinking, prettier than the Echo Show.

That said, I'm curious to know what you think of the product category overall. Do we need glorified tablets in the kitchen? Or anywhere else? I'm intrigued, just not yet convinced. I do think $250 is crazy -- the 8-inch model dipped to as low as $99 during Black Friday and Cyber Monday -- but $160 for the 10 incher feels more palatable.

Your thoughts?

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