Microsoft announces Office 2021 features and prices

Microsoft is launching Office 2021 on October 5th, and the company is finally detailing 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 cost $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 the Home versions for PC and Mac and everything in Outlook, as well as the rights to use all of Office's apps for business purposes.

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

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

Excel:

XLOOKUP Function - Helps to find items 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 specify names for calculation results.

XMATCH Function - It searches for a specified item in an array or range of cells and returns the relative position of the item.

OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3 Support

Updated Draw tab

performance improvements

Power point:

Record Slideshow - 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 pictures as they were drawn.

Arrange the elements on your slides for the screen reader - This lets you rearrange the elements to make them optimized for the screen reader.

OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3 Support

Updated Draw tab

performance improvements

Outlook:

Translator & Ink - Now you can annotate email, create a canvas for messages, or translate email into over 70 languages.

Quick 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, coinciding with the launch of Windows 11. Microsoft says Office 2021 is supported on the three most recent versions of Windows 11, Windows 10 and macOS.