Microsoft announces Office 2021 features and pricing

Microsoft is launching Office 2021 on October 5th, and the company is finally detailing the features and pricing today. Office 2021 will be the next standalone version of Microsoft’s Office suite, designed for businesses and consumers who want to avoid the subscription version of Office.

Office Home and Student 2021 will be priced at $149.99 and include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams for PC and Mac. Office Home and Business 2021 is priced at $249.99 and will include everything in the Home version and Outlook for PC and Mac, alongside the rights to use all of the Office apps for business purposes.

Office 2021 will include the collaboration features found in Microsoft 365 versions of Office, with real-time co-authoring, OneDrive support, and even Microsoft Teams integration. Office 2021 will also include the new Office design that has a refreshed ribbon interface, rounded corners, and a neutral color palette that all matches the UI changes in Windows 11.

Microsoft is also adding in some Microsoft 365 features to Office 2021, including modern Excel features, PowerPoint improvements, better inking in Office apps, and Outlook translation support. Here are all the new Office 2021 features:

Excel:

• XLOOKUP function – helps find things in a table or range by row in an Excel worksheet.
• Dynamic array support – new functions in Excel that use dynamic arrays.
• LET function – an Excel feature that lets you assign names to calculation results.
• XMATCH function – this searches for a specified item in an array or range of cells and returns the item’s relative position.
• OpenDocument format (ODF) 1.3 support
• Updated Draw tab
• Performance improvements

PowerPoint:

• Record Slide Show – this new PowerPoint feature includes presenter video recording, ink recording and laser pointer recording.
• Replay your ink strokes – if you’re using ink in PowerPoint, you can now replay illustrations as they were drawn.
• Arrange elements on your slides for screen readers – this lets you re-arrange elements to optimize them for screen readers.
• OpenDocument format (ODF) 1.3 support
• Updated Draw tab
• Performance improvements

Outlook:

• Translator and ink – You can now annotate emails, draw in a canvas for messages, or translate emails into more than 70 languages.
• Instant search – search results are now instant, with more ways to refine and filter results.
• Performance improvements

Word:

• OpenDocument format (ODF) 1.3 support
• Updated Draw tab
• Performance improvements

Office 2021 will be available on October 5th, alongside the launch of Windows 11. Microsoft says Office 2021 is supported on Windows 11, Windows 10, and the three most recent versions of macOS.