I'm seriously considering buying Visual Studio 2012 Professional but I'm trying to decide whether to get it with an MSDN subscription or not. If I get it with a subscription it adds nearly £500 on to the total cost which is a lot of money. Since I mainly do development work on one machine and don't really need to do much testing on older versions of Windows I don't think I'd get much benefit from that side of things. I'm primarily thinking of getting it because I want to transition some of my Microsoft Office VBA projects to using the Office development tools in Visual Studio so that I can finally ditch VBA in favour of C#. I guess I'd also benefit from the Windows Azure included services as well but other than that I'm not so sure.

Is there anything that I am missing here or should I just ignore the MSDN subscription and save myself £500?

The MSDN subscription is definitely nice. Depending on the level you buy at, you also get access to a production use license for Office as well as Azure usage as you mentioned. Are you sure you don't qualify for a program like DreamSpark or BizSpark? No reason to pay if you don't have to.

It dépends on subscription levels but mostly it gives you access to almost all server software from Microsoft, so usefull for testing (not for production, except a few Tools that can be included).

So it's basically visual studio + all OSes for testing + almost all software for testing, so if you develop software you want to test on say win2K8 with sql server 2008 & win2K12 with sql server 2012 and SharePoint, that's the use of MSDN!