As with the cloud-based version of Office, which is Office 365, Microsoft also launches offline versions of their suite. As opposed to monthly subscription-based plans for Office 365, people can use Office 2021 with a more revamped layout and tons of new features with a one-time initial payment. Let us now see what exciting things await us with the new Office 2021.

Microsoft Office 2021 Release Date

As we mentioned above, Microsoft Office 2021 will be released for regular consumers and small businesses on 5th October 2021. However, the LTSC version has already been released on 16th September 2021 for the larger corporations.

Microsoft Office 2021 system requirements

Below are the bare minimum computer requirements that you must have before you can use Office 2021 in your system:

CPU: 1 GHz Dual-Core processorGPU: DirectX 9 with WDDM 2.0Memory: 4 GB RAMStorage space: 4 GB availabilityDisplay Resolution: 1280 x 768.NET requirement: 4.6 or higherOther: Few Outlook features require Microsoft Edge WebView2

Microsoft Office 2021 Pricing

Microsoft has not officially disclosed the costs of Office 2021. However, they did mention that they currently do not plan on changing the price of the product. Therefore, the following (old) costs can be deduced for Office 2021:

Office Home & Student 2019 – £119.99/US$149.99Office Home & Business 2019 – £249.99/US$249.99

What’s new in Microsoft Office 2021

Microsoft has introduced a plethora of new features and improvements in contrast to the older versions. This includes new editing tools, motion graphics, accessibility features, functions, data types, and inking tools. This is only the tip of the iceberg! Here is a list of the most highlighted features in Office 2021:

A new refreshed design.Search bar on all Office apps.Significant performance enhancements.Support for OpenDocument format 1.3 added.New outline options for shapes added.Hex color value box added for selecting colors.XLOOKUP search capabilities for Excel.Dynamic array functions added to Excel.LET function incorporated to assign names to function results for Excel.XMATCH to pinpoint the relative position of items in Excel.Presenter video recording, ink recording, and laser pointer recording added to PowerPoint.Replay ink strokes in PowerPoint.Re-arrange slide elements in screen-reading order in PowerPoint.Over 70 languages are now supported for translation in Access.Tab manager for different database objects in Access.New Azure and AWS stencils and shapes in Visio.Instant search results in Outlook.Updated Draw tab in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.Revamped Dar Mode for Word.

To learn more about the upcoming changes in Office 2021, read this Microsoft post.

Microsoft Office 2021 compatibility with other versions

What would happen if you installed Office 2021 alongside other versions of Office, such as Office 2019, 2016, or Office 365? Well, if you already have a standalone older version of Microsoft Office installed on your device, then Office 2019 can be installed alongside it, although not recommended. This is because you may have trouble at the time of activation since both standalone Office versions will contact Microsoft servers for the activation code verification. However, in case you have a subscription for Office 365, then you cannot install Office 2021 alongside it, unless you install it using an MSI file. If you want more information about Office 2021 compatibility with other versions, read this Microsoft blog post.

Download and install Microsoft Office 2021

Note: We will update this post once Microsoft Office 2021 for Consumers is released. You can download Office 2021 from their official website. However, you will require an Office account to download the offline package. Alternatively, you can also sign in using a Microsoft account. Once logged in, click Install Office. You will then need to execute the downloaded file to install Office 2021. Note that you will require a valid Office key, which was purchased, to run the Office 2021 suite. In this section, we are answering some questions that you may have in mind regarding the new Microsoft Office 2021. If you can’t find your question here, please leave a comment below and we’ll try answering it for you.

Closing words

Installing or upgrading to Office 2021 is not a difficult task. However, you do need to ask yourself if you need to upgrade? Although this release offers some new features and performance enhancements, do you use the Office that much? If you are a consumer finding yourself coming across the Office app daily, we suggest that you do an upgrade to gain the best performance out of it. However, if you are an occasional user, then we think that an older version would still work fine to get your tasks done.