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Microsoft (News - Alert) is pushing its cloud-based Office 365 to as many people as it possibly can. The company has been working hard to get this new Office 365 solution out to companies by striking deals with retail partners and even by approaching platforms such as Lotus that it had largely ignored when it came to their desktop version of the Office suite. Microsoft has even gone so far as to priceOffice 2013 at levels that will clearly make it more attractive to go with Office 365. The next phase of the company’s plan is to ramp up adoption rates of Office 365 by moving it from the boardroom to the living room, actively pursuing the average home user of Office in a way the technology giant had not done until now.

The major push to get the average consumer to try out Office 365 is to offer up a trial version when users get the beta version of Office 2013. The currently free subscription service is being called Office 365 Home Premium Preview and can be installed and used on up to five different computers. The suite includes Word, Excel, Access, OneNote, Outlook and Publisher. One of the really neat features of Office 365 is that you can actually start using parts of the program before the entire suite has downloaded. This means that should you decide to give Office 365 a try, you don’t have to wait long at all to do so.

The feature of using parts of the suite before the suite is actually completely downloaded is called Office On Demand and it does have its drawbacks.  The average user will see that the On Demand version will not be as responsive as the locally installed version and don’t attempt to complete huge projects such as embedding videos into a PowerPoint presentation.

Office 365 is also aware that Skype (News - Alert) is a shiny new toy that more and more home users are taking advantage of on a larger scale. In order to accommodate people in this area and make the new Office 365 suite a little more attractive, those who get the Office 2013 demo and use Office 365 will also get 60 free minutes of International calls per month.