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Is Microsoft Office 2021 worth it?

Office 2021 includes lots of changes. Let’s dive right in.

is microsoft office 2021 worth itLet’s start with price. Office 2021 is a significant upgrade over the previous version, with version 2021 available for either $120 per month ($500 per year) or $120 per user per year. That’s a 28% price increase. Other major Office apps, such as Microsoft OneNote, RealEstate, and Publisher, cost much more. But remember, the subscription price is only for each individual app if you’re a customer — if you buy an Office plan, you’re basically paying one price for office software.

Also worth noting is the migration from older versions of Office to this newer version. The installation process is simpler, and migration from one version to another is much easier than usual. It requires only a few mouse clicks every time you want a new version, and there are few options to change the interfaces between them. It seems many people were not happy about the newer, more resource-intensive style of installation and setup, but Microsoft has certainly made a solid argument for their migrations, and they definitely seem to have smoothed the workflow with Office 2021.

In addition, Office 2021 can be run on Windows 10 and Apple’s iOS. Microsoft is also planning to release Office mobile this fall, which will replace some of the desktop features available in Office 2021. That will help round out the list of perks it offers. There are upgrades in the new release for another year as well, including a new design, better cloud integration, and more extensibility. Most obviously, it incorporates some interesting search-and-workflow features, but there are also new sharing options, additional XML driven markup, renamed tags, and syncing of files between apps.

Every upgrade gets better value for money.

Microsoft has historically been one of the best companies at upfront marketing, so that’s one of many reasons to trust Office 2021, and not surprisingly, one of the big reasons to buy into the new release. But there is another big benefit: every new release includes new, improved features. There’s significant engineering work every time, and Microsoft is making big bets on delivering the most up-to-date features possible. This includes categories such as accessibility, collaboration, security, and reliability.

Office 2021 includes a plethora of important updates that will provide many productivity and SEO benefits for those who own and use Office 365/Microsoft 365 in the future. Here’s what to know about the new Office and the many new features included in the release. It provides many features that have been in the toolbox in the past, only now the version has been pushed out over time to better compete with Google’s suite. Most of these features are already available in Office 365 or the Microsoft Organization Platform (Power Platform).

Office 2019 introduced various search capabilities, including suggestions based on people’s Search History, sorting documents by date or by size, and the ability to track keyword results across multiple searches. These new search capabilities are present in Office 2021 as well but now have the ability to be instant instead of occurring every time a user opens a document. For those installing Office 2021, external links are no longer required in order to access specific documents within this suite. The ability to save documents from specific authors and folders has also been replaced by the option to save most documents from specific languages in the document picker. Saved documents look great and are much quicker to open.

Office 2021 allows for inter-module sharing. Previously, if you shared multiple documents, the inter-module permissions were the most restrictive. There are now no inter-module restrictions. If certain users or groups have permission to access a specific document (for example, members of the same internal team) all members of the group are granted permission to access the document. The inter-module permissions can be viewed and/or edited within the Office Dashboard app, which is included with Office 2021.

Office 365/Power Platform integrations not available with Office 2021 include:

  • The ability to create and share internal referring links within self-hosted shared folders using the OSE HTML Editor.
  • Exporting seven years of productivity data of previous customers from within the Shared Folders (Shared Caches) feature within the Microsoft UI (winMerge).
  • Delay resume highlighting from future users in Outlook.
  • URL Protected from external links that appear in messages including Outlook on the iPad/iPhone.
  • The ability to search within a specific User’s Messages in Outlook.com.
  • Ability to export to Google Docs from multiple Google Apps.
  • The ability to add and communicate with users across multiple time zones.
  • Search filters over email.
  • The ability to filter keywords and macros in recipe creation.
  • Device connectivity and device history being available directly in the Word Viewer.
  • Sending email to and downloading from LinkedIn.