You could get Office 365 for free if you're on OneDrive

OneDrive

Microsoft has begun to send out invites to some OneDrive users, offering them a free full year's subscription to Office 365 Personal.

That's a rather smart freebie indeed, but it's actually following up on a promise that Redmond made at the end of last year, when the company slashed the basic amount of free storage on OneDrive from 15GB to 5GB (though following a pretty major backlash, an option to avoid this was added later on, if you visited a web link) and ditched unlimited storage for Office 365 users who were apparently abusing it.

At any rate, when Microsoft announced this move, it also promised that it would be offering the free Office 365 subscription as something of a sweetener, and naturally the company has stayed true to its word. Although the offer is seemingly for those who are close to, or have been put over, their new storage limit thanks to the changes (if over, they have a year's grace to trim their files down back below that new limit).

Invitations are starting to go out to these folks, and indeed this offer may have already been available to some who checked out the upgrade section of their OneDrive account over the past month, as Neowin reports.

Note that with the free year's subscription to Office 365, you get 1TB of OneDrive storage (and further note that you will need a credit card to sign up for the offer – if you're only wanting a free year, don't forget to switch off auto-renewal, or you could find yourself stumping up cash in the future).

The Office 365 Personal (plus 1TB OneDrive storage) subscription normally runs to £60 per year, or £5.99 per month ($70 per year, or $6.99 per month in the US).

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).