Microsoft Office 2021 vs Microsoft 365 Comparison

Microsoft Office 2021 vs Microsoft 365 Comparison

Microsoft Office 2021 vs Microsoft 365 Comparison


We are going to look at the brand new microsoft office 2021 which just recently came out and we are going to compare it to microsoft 365.   If you want to get the desktop apps for word excel and powerpoint you'll have to choose one of these options before

What exactly is the difference between these two options?

The price and features provided with Office 2021 are the major considerations that will most likely influence your decision.

You pay a one-time charge and acquire a perpetual or lifetime licence to office, which means you won't have to pay Microsoft again if you're still using the copy of office you bought six years from now.

Office 2021 is available in two different versions. The first is home and student, which costs $150 and includes the desktop apps for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams. The second is home and business, which costs a hundred dollars more, or $250, and includes everything in the home and student version plus the addition of Microsoft Outlook and the ability to use it for commercial purposes.

Does it seems to be a good deal? Read and decide

There are certain drawbacks. Microsoft clearly wants more people to choose the microsoft 365 option, but office 2021 can only be installed on one computer, so if you have two computers, you'll need to purchase another licence.

Also, you will not receive any feature updates, so what you buy is what you get. This is probably the best option if you despise subscription fees and don't care about getting all of Microsoft 365's latest features.

In a subscription model, we must continue to pay for the privilege of using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Although Microsoft prefers this choice, why would someone pick a subscription over a one-time fee with Microsoft 365?

We'd actually pay less in the first two years with the individual plan (70 dollars per year), and we'd pay $100 per year with the family plan (good for up to six people). With Microsoft 365, you get everything you get in Office 2021, but you get even more, like 6 TB of storage space with the family plan, which is ideal for backing up photos and documents.

You may install office on up to 30 different devices with the family subscription, and you also receive 60 minutes of international Skype calling and access to other programmes such as access and publisher.

Other features and services will be updated over time as Microsoft continues to invest in it and release new features, and you will automatically receive them as part of your subscription.

The easiest way to see the difference is to draw a picture of it. Microsoft 365 is regularly updated, and new features are released on a regular basis, whereas Office is a one-time purchase, with new versions released every two to three years.

What's new in office 2021?

Real-time co-authoring and that's available in word excel and powerpoint and  this allows you to work with others on the same document. Remember the document should be stored in one drive.

Real-time co-authoring

Word there's something new called line focus which helps you read a document by just focusing on one line at a time.  Get access to modern comments you can see who's in your document at the same time there's also been a visual refresh and it matches the look of windows 11.

Rounded windows a more neutral color palette and just overall a softer look you also get access to stock images and icons you can use microsoft search in the apps to look for functionality or help in your documents.

Rounded windows a more neutral color palette


The updated draw tab where you could use this sketched style outline you could enter hex colors in the color picker.

Performance updates across the board and in excel there are now many new functions

New one called x lookup which is quite a bit better than vlookup it allows you to look things up in your spreadsheet

x lookup
Using of dynamic arrays like filter sort by

LET function, with the let function you can assign names to calculation results you can also use x match and with this function, you can search for a specified item in an array and you can get the relative position back

LET function



You can also set up various sheet views to help you get back to the view that you care about.

Powerpoint you can now record your presentation using video and audio you can also record your inking on a slide.

inking on a slide

Outlook you can now instantly search for messages and lastly you can also ink to annotate your message in outlook.

Microsoft Teams now comes bundled together with office previously you could download microsoft teams but now it just comes with office so you no longer have to go out to get it.

All new features which are developed and released, they just automatically became part of microsoft 365. We are going with microsoft 365 subscription that's because we produce videos on office latest functionality.  We also use 6 TB of space to back things up in one drive.

You can make a decision Based on your requirements.  All in all we as users are going to experience a great productivity tool bundled with latest technology.

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