Microsoft Office 2021 Professional Plus is the final version of the world’s most popular office suite, now featuring a new dark mode and no requirement for a Microsoft 365 subscription.
Designed for both personal use and small businesses, this latest offering, Office LTSC (Long Term Servicing Channel), incorporates some new features and performance enhancements across its well-known applications: Word 2021, Excel 2021, PowerPoint 2021, Outlook 2021, Publisher 2021, Access 2021, OneNote, Skype for Business, and Teams.
As with the 2019 version, it’s exclusively available for Windows 10 and Windows 11.
Office 2021 Pro Plus
If you’re a user of Office 2019 or 2016, you’ll hardly notice any significant changes in this new 2021 version. Its interface closely resembles those versions, with only a few minor additions and improvements. Notably, it’s a ‘one-time purchase’ version that doesn’t require any subscriptions.
One of the major highlights of this version is the dark mode. After the widespread adoption of this dark interface for visual ease in many popular applications and websites, Microsoft has finally integrated it into its suite. Enabling it switches the program interface—including the toolbar, scrollbar, and entire document—to a dark theme. For instance, in Microsoft Word 2021, the document sheet turns dark, and black text becomes white. However, there’s an option to maintain only the document sheet with a white background.
Other novelties pertain to specific Office applications. Updates include performance enhancements across all programs, slide recordings with narration in PowerPoint, dynamic arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel replacing functions like VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, and LOOKUP, as well as an immersive line-focused reading mode in Word, among others.
Remember, you can download Office 2021 for free for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 11 and Windows 10.
Five-Year Support Instead of Seven
For five years from the release date, Office 2021 will only receive security patches and bug fixes. This policy announced by Microsoft shortens the support period by two years compared to Office 2019 and is supposedly half the expected fixed lifecycle.
In essence, users purchasing this ‘one-time purchase’ version instead of subscribing to Microsoft 365 will receive support for five years, two years less than Microsoft’s standard offering.
Businesses that don’t require frequent software updates or have devices offline will find this version an economical and efficient way to work with documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. However, similar to previous versions, they won’t have cloud access or the advantages it brings.
Features
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New dark mode
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XLOOKUP in Excel replacing VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, and LOOKUP
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Dynamic arrays in Excel
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PowerPoint supports slide recordings with narration
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Line-focused reading mode in Word
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Performance updates.
Requirements
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Operating System: Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 10 LTSC 2019, Windows Server 2019 32 or 64-bit
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RAM: Minimum 4 GB
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Disk Space: Minimum 4 GB free space.
Download Link: Microsoft Office 2021 Professional Plus
