If you’re setting up a new computer, however, and you don’t have an existing license for Office, then you won’t regret starting with the 2021 edition. If you’re already running the 2016 or 2019 version, and you don’t really need these new 2021 improvements, you don't need to spend money on the new version. None of these new features are revolutionary. Outlook gets on-the-fly translations, faster searches, freehand inking, and more.įor the first time, Office ships with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft’s answer to Slack. PowerPoint lets you replay animations in which you apply freehand inking to a slide and adds a feature that lets you create a link to a specific slide and send the link to a colleague, with an option to let them edit it. Microsoft 365 subscribers saw these features added gradually over the past two years.Įxcel has formulas that immediately return an array of values, a function that assigns names to the results of calculations so that you can use those names in a formula, a function that returns the relative position of an item in a range of cell, and customized views for individual sheets. Keep mind that these will be new only if you’re coming from an earlier perpetual-license version.
If you’re upgrading from the 2019 version, here’s a list of the major new features. You don’t have to worry about learning a new interface. If, however, you’re using an older perpetual-license version, such as Office 2019, Office 2016, or earlier versions, you’ll find new and mostly improved features that you may decide are worth having-more about those in a moment.Įxcept for the newly slotted-in features, Office 2021 looks mostly like the 20 versions. If you’re already using Office apps through a Microsoft 365 subscription, you won’t find any surprises in Office 2021. Here we cover Office Professional 2021 for Windows, but much of it applies equally to Office for Mac, which also now comes in a perpetual license version.
If you’re a corporate IT manager or just don’t like subscriptions, you’ll prefer the perpetual-license version. You also miss out on generous OneDrive online storage and other extras. When you buy the perpetual license version, you get security updates every few months, but you don’t get the monthly jolt of new features that Microsoft provides to subscribers. Microsoft also offers Office as a subscription called Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), which requires you to pay for it by the month or year. Read our editorial mission (Opens in a new window) & see how we test (Opens in a new window). Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions.
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