Office LTSC Standard 2021 Acdmc

Description

Things are no different with Office 2021 (and Office LTSC 2021). The new perpetual release gets a handful of features that were already present in Office 365/Microsoft 365, with many other features left out. And like Office 2016 and 2019, Office 2021 will receive no new features in the future, though it will receive security updates.

All that said, the features that have been added to Office 2021 are welcome, particularly a full collaborative editing experience. Here’s what’s new in this version, and what it will cost you.

Real-time co-authoring
Although Microsoft trumpeted live collaboration as a key feature in Office 2016, it turned out that the full real-time collaborative editing experience (what Microsoft calls “co-authoring”) was reserved for Office 365 subscribers. The Word 2016 and PowerPoint 2016 desktop clients for non-subscribers offered a kludgy sort of group collaboration, in which you had to keep saving the shared document to share your changes with others and see the changes they were making. To actually see changes in real time, you had to use the less powerful online versions of Word and PowerPoint. And the Excel 2016 desktop client didn’t offer live collaboration to non-subscribers at all.

In Office 2019, real-time co-authoring did come to Word, but not to Excel or PowerPoint. Non-subscribers still had to use Excel Online and PowerPoint Online to collaborate in real time.

With Office 2021, real-time co-authoring is finally available in all three desktop clients, as long as the documents you’re collaborating on are stored in Microsoft’s cloud storage service, OneDrive. Everyone working on the documents sees the changes everyone else makes as they happen. Colored cursors indicate the identity of each person. See our “PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 cheat sheet” for details on how it works.

Office 2021 pricing and support
Prices for Office 2021 remain the same as for Office 2019: Office Home and Student 2021, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams, costs $150. Office Home and Business 2021, which includes all that plus Outlook, costs $250 and includes rights to use the apps for business. Each can be used by only a single person. You’ll need a Microsoft account to use them.

Office LTSC 2021 for enterprises (available in Professional Plus and Standard editions) is available only through volume licensing, with prices rising 10% from Office 2019.

Both Office 2021 and Office LTSC 2021 will receive only five years of support, down from 10 years for Office 2016 and seven for Office 2019 — yet another method Microsoft is employing to nudge both individuals and businesses toward its subscription offerings.