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Office 2021 is 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 be priced at $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 everything in the Home version and Outlook for PC and Mac, alongside the rights to use all of the Office apps for business purposes.

Office 2021 include the collaboration features found in Microsoft 365 versions of Office, with real-time co-authoring, OneDrive support, and even Microsoft Teams integration. Office 2021 also include the new Office design that has a refreshed ribbon interface, rounded corners, and a neutral color palette that all matches the UI changes in Windows 11.
With Microsoft Teams, it’s easier to get connected with everyone in your life so you can make plans and manage tasks big and small, together. Chat and video call with anyone, meet virtually in a cafe or a family lounge, assign tasks to help with chores at home, create and respond to polls, and much more—without ever leaving the app. Updated apps include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Project, Publisher, and Visio.

Microsoft is also adding in some Microsoft 365 features to Office 2021, including modern Excel features, PowerPoint improvements, better inking in Office apps, and Outlook translation support.

Both Microsoft 365 and Office 2021 run on Windows 11, Windows 10, and the three most recent versions of macOS. Note that Office 2013 won’t be supported on Windows 11, so now is the right time to upgrade to Microsoft 365 or Office 2021 if you’re planning to upgrade to Windows 11. Finally, to use Microsoft 365 or Office 2021, both a Microsoft account and an internet connection are required.

In Office 2021, you'll find new inking tools, data types, functions, translation and editing tools, motion graphics, ease-of-use features, and so much more:

Excel:

XLOOKUP function – helps find things 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 assign names to calculation results.
XMATCH function – this searches for a specified item in an array or range of cells and returns the item’s relative position.
OpenDocument format (ODF) 1.3 support
Updated Draw tab
Performance improvements

PowerPoint:

Record Slide Show – 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 illustrations as they were drawn.
Arrange elements on your slides for screen readers – this lets you re-arrange elements to optimize them for screen readers.
OpenDocument format (ODF) 1.3 support
Updated Draw tab
Performance improvements

Outlook:

Translator and ink – You can now annotate emails, draw in a canvas for messages, or translate emails into more than 70 languages.
Instant 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