At the beginning of this year, Microsoft announced Office 2021, the next permanent version of the Office suite. Microsoft Office 2021 will be released for business customers, consumers and small businesses, and will be fully available on October 5, 2021, following the official version of Windows 11.
Today, Microsoft announced the pricing and new features of Office 2021:
The Office 2021 Home and Student Edition is priced at US$149.99 (the same price as Office 2019), including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams for PC and Mac. The Office 2021 Small Business Edition is priced at US$249.99 (the same price as Office 2019), including Home Edition content, Outlook for PC and Mac, and the right to use all Office applications for commercial purposes.
Office 2021 will support collaboration features in the Microsoft 365 version of Office, including real-time collaborative authoring, OneDrive support, and even Microsoft Teams integration. Office 2021 will also include a new Office design, which has a new ribbon interface, rounded corners and color matching to match the Windows 11 UI.
The following are the new features of Office 2021:
Excel
- XLOOKUP Function: to help find the contents of a table or area in an Excel worksheet row by row.
- Dynamic Array Support: new functions in Excel that use dynamic arrays.
- LET Function: an Excel function used to specify a name for the calculation result.
- XMATCH Function: Search for a specified item in an array or cell range, and return the relative position of the item.
- OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3 support.
- Updated Draw tab.
- Performance improvement.
PowerPoint
- Recording Slides: Supports presenter video recording, ink recording and laser pointer recording.
- Replay ink Strokes: If the user uses ink in PowerPoint, the drawn illustration can now be replayed.
- Arrange Elements on the slide for screen readers: Users can rearrange elements to optimize for screen readers.
- OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3 support.
- Updated Draw tab.
- Performance improvement.
Outlook
- Translation and ink: users can add notes to emails, draw messages on canvas, or translate emails into more than 70 languages.
- Instant search: search results are now instant, there are more ways to optimize and filter the results.
- Performance improvement.
Word
- OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3 support.
- Updated Draw tab.
- Performance improvement.
Office 2021 supports Windows 11, Windows 10 and the last three versions of macOS. It will be launched on October 5th. The complete new content can be viewed on the official website here.
