Microsoft announced today that it will release Office 2021 for Windows and Mac by the end of 2021 and be supported for five years.
“We plan to release Office 2021 for personal and small business use later this year,” Microsoft corporate vice president Jared Spataro revealed today. “Office 2021 will be supported for five years with the traditional ‘one-time purchase’ model.”
Office 2021 will ship on both Windows and Mac and will include the OneNote app. On Windows, it will be available in both 32- and 64-bit versions.
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Additionally, Microsoft says that it will not change the price for the various Office 2021 products when compared to their Office 2019 equivalents. The software giant says that it will provide more details about new features included in Office 2021 closer to general availability.
dftf
<blockquote><em><a href="#614145">In reply to phayz:</a></em></blockquote><p>Kind of hard thesedays to define what apps "Office" actually includes… officially, it comprises of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access and Publisher, as these are what all O365 subscriptions include at a minimum, or what you'd get in Office 2019 ProPlus.</p><p><br></p><p>Yet Visio and Project also come under the "Office" banner, but have always been a separate standalone purchase, or separate cloud-based licence.</p><p><br></p><p>And Access, Publisher, Visio and Project all remain Windows-only.</p><p><br></p><p>And in enterprises, you then have other things like "SharePoint" or "Lync" (the predecessor to Skype for Business, and now Teams) which were also Office-branded</p>
b6gd
<p>Good move on their part. Honestly if I could not get it from work for free (Office 365) I would not subscribe to it. I use maybe 5% of Office these days. Having a stand alone copy I can purchase once every 5 years or more, is a good option to have.</p>
dftf
<blockquote><em><a href="#614132">In reply to b6gd:</a></em></blockquote><p>Yeah, similar to hrlngrv, if you rarely use Office why not consider an alternative?</p><p><br></p><p>LibreOffice, WPS Office and SoftMaker FreeOffice are all desktop-based, and provide Word, Excel and PowerPoint alternatives. Or if you don't mind a browser-based solution, Microsoft's free online versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint would do for many users.</p><p><br></p><p>(If you need VBA, macros, add-ins or ActiveX controls in files then clearly that'll be an issue)</p>
dftf
<blockquote><em><a href="#614140">In reply to Winner:</a></em></blockquote><p>Assuming it's a 16:9 desktop monitor, you could always rotate it 90-degrees to portrait orientation, then go to Start > Settings > System > Display and rotate the OS screen</p><p><br></p><p>For a laptop, I guess you're out-of-luck. But remember you can just double-click on any tab heading to hide the ribbon, then just click on a tab to show it briefly when you need it</p>
dftf
<blockquote><em><a href="#614301">In reply to hrlngrv:</a></em></blockquote><p>Given the various changes that will have been made to the UI, not to mention new-features, will retaining the old local Help files be that beneficial?</p><p><br></p><p>Also, don't the O365 apps have to connect to the Internet every 30, 60 or 90 days or something to confirm the licence is still valid, and no-more than 5 installs have been made using that same licence? And if you can't connect, they'll go into a reduced-functionality mode where you can only open and print files?</p>
innitrichie
<p>I can't wait to get started with Office 2021. The possibilities are literally limitless with this huge upcoming update.</p>
dftf
<blockquote><em><a href="#614459">In reply to MutualCore:</a></em></blockquote><p>Or even just the free, online versions you can run inside a web-browser… they'll be fine for many-people who don't need to do anything advanced</p>