Office 2021 Standard: What's New?

Office 2021 Standard is the latest perpetual (one-time purchase) version of Microsoft's productivity suite. It shares many features with the subscription-based Microsoft 365, but there are important differences. Here is what you need to know.

Following the launch of Office LTSC 2021 for businesses, Microsoft released Office 2021 Standard for home, student and small business users. This perpetual version of the Office suite is available now on our website.

For years, Microsoft has favoured its subscription service, Office 365 or Microsoft 365, over the perpetual version of Office. Subscribers pay ongoing fees and receive continuous updates, while buyers of the perpetual version pay once and own the software indefinitely.

When Office 2016 was released at the end of 2015, the perpetual and subscription versions shared the same features. That soon changed: Microsoft began adding features exclusively to Office 365, leaving the perpetual version behind. When Office 2019 arrived three years later, it included only a subset of the features available in Office 365 at the time. From that point, Office 2019 received no further feature updates while Microsoft 365 continued to evolve.

With Office 2021 Standard, Microsoft has closed much of the gap. This release includes most of the features that had previously been exclusive to Microsoft 365. However, as with all perpetual versions, Office 2021 will not receive new features going forward — only security updates.

Real-time co-authorship

Although Microsoft promoted live collaboration as a key feature of Office 2016, real-time co-authoring was actually reserved for Office 365 subscribers.

Non-subscribers using Word 2016 and PowerPoint 2016 had to save repeatedly to share changes with others — a clunky workaround at best. Real-time editing required the less powerful online versions of Word and PowerPoint, while Excel 2016 desktop offered no live collaboration for non-subscribers at all.

The Office 2019 suite brought real-time co-authoring to Word, but not to Excel or PowerPoint. Non-subscribers still had to use the online versions for real-time collaboration in those apps.

With Office 2021, real-time co-authoring is finally available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint on the desktop, provided the documents are stored on OneDrive. Everyone working on a document sees changes as they happen, with coloured cursors showing who is editing where.

The "look and feel" is like Windows 11

Microsoft released Office 2021 on the same day as Windows 11, and the visual refresh reflects that. The suite features rounded window corners, a more neutral colour palette and a softer overall aesthetic that matches Windows 11. Despite the new look, Office 2021 is fully compatible with Windows 10.

Integration with Microsoft Teams

Office 2021 integrates with Microsoft Teams chat and video features, allowing you to start conversations and join video calls directly from Office apps.
Teams is built into Windows 11, but Office 2021 brings this integration to Windows 10 and macOS as well.

Note that the version of Teams included with Office 2021 and Office LTSC 2021 is not the full enterprise edition and does not include features such as channels or searchable message archives.

Other new functions

Office 2021 also includes several features that were previously exclusive to Microsoft 365:
Excel gains a host of new functions, including XLOOKUP for flexible table lookups and dynamic arrays that return multiple values from a single formula. The XMATCH function searches an array or range and returns the relative position of a match, making complex lookups far simpler.

● Slide recording features have been improved in PowerPoint, including video recording of the presenter, ink recording and laser pointer recording.

● Outlook gets an improved search called "Instant Search" as well as the possibility to translate messages into more than 70 languages and to label e-mail messages with ink.

● Access (only available in some corporate Office editions) gets an updated linked table manager and a new extended date/time data type.

● Overall, there are more stock images and icons, a Microsoft search box for searching content in various Office applications, AutoSave that automatically saves changes to

OneDrive, support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3 and some background performance improvements, among other changes.

Office 2021 Prices and Support

The Office 2021 package licence is available on our website from just €64.99. Both Office 2021 and Office LTSC 2021 receive five years of support. While that is shorter than the support periods offered for Office 2016 (ten years) and Office 2019 (seven years), it still represents excellent value compared to an ongoing subscription.

If you already have a licence key, you can download Office 2021 directly from our website.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below. You can also visit the Microsoft website for additional information.

Best regards,

The Licendi Team