Office 2021 or Microsoft 365, which is better

31 years ago, a revolutionary office platform, the software Microsoft called Office, came to people. In fact, I don't need to add any descriptions and annotations to it, because Word, Excel and PowerPoint that make up this office suite have occupied most of the time people spend sitting in front of the computer for more than 30 years, going in and out of the office every day People who haven't heard of Office's famous name. I don't know if Microsoft has statistics on the usage time, maybe it can't be counted, but for sure - Office is definitely the longest-used application software on the planet, no one! Today's young people don't feel much about Office, but our generation who came from the DOS era has a deep impression of it, and it can even be said to be an emotional connection. At that time, the "word processing software" in the DOS environment was the technical high point that major manufacturers competed for. The earliest Microsoft Word under MS-DOS did not have an absolute advantage until it was placed in Microsoft Word together with Excel and PowerPoint. Office 1.0, and on the Windows 2.0 system brings us a different experience. Although Microsoft Office 1.0 is so "rudimentary" in today's eyes, at that time Microsoft defeated old competitors such as WordPerfect and Lotus with it. The "mouse-centric" control concept can be said to break the previous word. Dealing with the shackles of software, the young Microsoft even used it to get tickets to the "$1 billion technology company club". It is very interesting to compare the original interface of Microsoft Word with the latest Microsoft Office 2021, and you can still find LOGOs with most basic functions. Although so many generations of technical changes endow the new version with powerful and rich functions, its foundation is not the same. No change is made for higher office efficiency. It can even be said that Microsoft has cultivated the same line of user habits for three decades. This design has made Microsoft Office the first choice for most people's office work. The above text is not written for nostalgia, but to go to newer and better products - the most important updates of Office in recent years - Office 2021 and Microsoft 365 . This is another major version change of Office since 2019, especially when it was released with Windows 11, its operating habits and visual design have also undergone corresponding changes with the new operating system. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced Office 2021 and Office LTSC consumer long-term support version information, and at the end of October, Microsoft officially released Office 2021. Nowadays, there are also many articles and videos about the experience of Office 2021 on the Internet, but I simply browsed more than ten articles and found that most of them are for the preview version, and the function update is not complete or the expression is inaccurate, so I decided to do my best. I can write a full version of the Office 2021 experience for readers' reference. The difference between Office 2021 and Microsoft 365 is still unclear to some users. Today's topic may start with the traceability and difference between the two Office products. As mentioned at the beginning, Microsoft has always named this office suite Office, and each major version change is distinguished by the year of update, which you can understand as a software version launched for single-machine users. Microsoft 365 is a cloud service version of Office. It was first launched in 2011 under the name Office 365. It provides web-based applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook, and provides OneDrive cloud storage, although its The function is the same as the localized Office, but it was an independent product at the beginning of its launch, and then it skipped the "Office" name and called it Microsoft 365 directly. It can be seen that Microsoft's "cloud office software" of attention. Of course, this division is not absolute, because Microsoft also brought the collaboration features in Microsoft 365 to Office 2021 this year (through real-time co-authoring, working with others on the same document, any person makes changes, all sharers will be notified. ), so Office 2021 also enjoys services from the cloud. It is not difficult to understand why Microsoft launched Office 365 that year. Greater network bandwidth and more mature cloud service environments such as Azure require Microsoft to provide more flexible software deployment and services to different users. I still remember that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once said at the launch of Office 365: This is "the combination of Office and cloud computing", and reiterating its product nature is to emphasize Microsoft's control over cloud services At that time, more than one critic and professional media evaluated it as a crucial technological turning point for Microsoft. With the launch of Office 365, Microsoft's original intention was to build a moat against Google Apps attacks, and at the same time stimulate the activity of Office users through flexible purchasing methods. However, this attempt made Microsoft unexpectedly reap even bigger fruits-it is precisely through the continuous improvement of Office 365 that Microsoft has become a leading manufacturer of virtualization services for desktops and applications, and even its virtualization technology is involved in the local virtualization of servers. environmental applications. To make it clearer, Microsoft 365 is more of a subscription service than a pure software product, and the Microsoft 365 plan proposed by Microsoft can target families and individuals, small and medium-sized businesses, large enterprises, schools, and non-profit organizations. supply. Yes, you read that right, more and more enterprise market users have also chosen Microsoft 365, which can be said to cover all the original user groups of Office. Since Microsoft 365 services are more flexible and "cheaper" (I will explain the different versions and prices of Office 2021 and Microsoft 365 in a moment), and the functions are exactly the same as Office 2021, then why does Microsoft insist on the Office series of products Woolen cloth? Here I quote the original words of Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365: "In the past 10 months, many customers have migrated to the cloud, but there are still users who cannot make such changes, such as regulated industries, manufacturing plants, etc." Not only that, but there are still a large number of OEM machines that will still have the home and student versions of Office 2021 pre-installed, and there are still a large number of users in the market who like to buy out at one time. For example, schools and other government and enterprise institutions will also choose to purchase the authorization for a longer time. The Office LTSC Long Term Support version for use on PCs in the internal network (currently licensed for 5 years). Speaking of which, it will be easy for you to understand the different charging methods between Office 2021 and Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 has two versions: personal version and family version. The difference between them is also for individual (single) users and family (team) users, and their prices are $69.99USD per year and 498 $99.99USD per year  respectively on Microsoftstore.com. Among them, the home version can support up to 6 shares with one purchase, and can be installed on 5 cross-platform devices (including PC, tablet and mobile phone). From the perspective of cost performance, I will vote for an extra 100 yuan. But there are 5 more licensed home editions. As a service purchased on an annual basis, Microsoft 365 has 8 Office software and services including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, of which OneDrive cloud storage space is 1TB, which is much larger than Office 2021. Office 2021 has three versions: Office 2021 Home and Student Edition, Office 2021 Home Business Edition and Office 2021 Professional Edition. The prices are $35USD , $59.99USD  and $59.99USD on Keyingo.com respectively. It is still the traditional way of buying and using this version of the software, only for stand-alone authorization. , the first two can be used in Windows (Windows 10, Windows 11) and Mac OS systems, and the professional version is only the Windows version, because its professional functions can only be used in the Windows system environment. In terms of software collocation, the home and student editions have only three commonly used softwares, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The small business edition has joined Outlook, and the professional edition has 8 kinds of software and services. Unlike Microsoft 365, it has 5GB of OneDrive cloud storage (it should be noted that some confidential customers will not support cloud sync). It is the difference between the payment models. Microsoft 365 users can always use the latest version of Office, while users who purchase traditional Office have the right to use the current version at the time of purchase. Although the new features of the next version update cannot be upgraded, Microsoft will. Keep it up to date with security updates. It should be noted that the update of the operating system will actually have a certain impact on traditional Office users: for example, the new operating system Windows 11 will no longer provide support for Office 2013, so users who upgrade the new operating system are actually buying the new version of Office. The best timing. From the perspective of cost performance, I will give you an account: a piece of software is used for 8 years under the current latest operating system environment. In fact, the annual cost is not high, and if you do not upgrade the operating system, it can still continue to be used. . Next, what everyone is most interested in is what feature upgrades have been made to Office 2021 and Microsoft 365. I try to give a comprehensive introduction, because there are still many upgrade items in this major version, it is impossible to interpret and describe my experience in depth for each function, so I will present the upgrade features in front of everyone as comprehensively as possible. Considering that most individual consumers will get the OEM version of Office 2021 when they buy a branded machine, I will also start chatting with Office 2021. From the perspective of the major upgrade direction, Office 2021 has four major update function sections: "Creation Method", "Data Processing", "Shared Collaboration" and "Accessibility Function". I will explain them one by one for everyone below. 1 I also mentioned just now that all the exterior designs of Office 2021 have been updated in sync with Windows 11, using visual treatments such as single-line icons, neutral color palettes and window rounding, and the entire interface is more concise and refined. In addition, the function layout of the "Start" menu has been optimized and adjusted, a drawing tab has been added to the menu, and two new tabs, PDF toolset and Acrobat, have been added to strengthen the linkage with PDF files. 2 More icons, templates and fonts provide PowerPoint with more powerful creative capabilities, users can not only use new visual objects to make slides, but also quickly through navigation functions (can search for functions or commands in the software) and search functions. Find what you need. 3 A presenter window can be added to the recording slideshow to present ink recordings and laser pointer recordings in real time. After the ink is recorded, it can realize functions such as replay and rewind, and can speed up or slow down the animation speed. Not only that, the painting effect can also be exported separately. 4 Supports touch devices and is built around the new inking feature. Personally, I believe that Microsoft should improve its software configuration from the launch of Surface and other touch products. I think its importance is no less than the revolutionary change of "mouse-centric" in the past. I believe that the functions and interface of Office will gradually change in the future. Tilt towards touch. 5 The new data processing functions of Office 2021 mainly expand the application of Excel, including dynamic array functions, 6 new array functions and XLOOKUP row by row search function. The dynamic array function may seem very mysterious, but you can understand its principle after using it a few times: it uses a function to write a formula, and then obtains the return value of the array. If the return value is returned in an adjacent cell, it is called "overflow". ”, the overflow formula is actually the most commonly used dynamic array formula. 6 This update of Excel adds six new functions, namely FILTER, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, SEQUENCE and RANDARRAY. Time is limited, I only tried the first two, FILTER (screening) and SORT (sorting), other friends can try them one by one. The previous picture is the result of using the filter function to perform the overflow formula calculation on the array, and the above picture is the result of the overflow calculation using sorting (descending order). If you still don't understand, you can search "What's new in Office 2021" on Microsoft's official website, and there will be corresponding introductions. 7 The XLOOKUP function is actually to solve the problem of searching data in huge and complex tables. Take the table on the left side of the above figure as an example. The first column is the country (lookup item), and the third column is the data (lookup value). If you need to enter the lookup item will display the search value, just need to "input XLOOKUP + select the sub-function (that is, Brazil in the yellow box) + select the search item + select the search value in the box", and replace Brazil with other countries in the search item, and also The corresponding lookup values ​​are displayed. 8 In addition, Excel has updated two functions: the LET function and the XMATCH function. People with editing skills can easily understand that the LET function is an assignment function, which assigns the operation process to a name, so as to avoid errors and increase the system burden when repeatedly calling the function for operation. The XMATCH function is relatively simple, that is, it searches the relative position of the search item in the array, and can also return its value in the array. The reason why I'm going through the functions in Excel item by item is that they are really useful and seem complicated, but they are actually very easy to use. The shared collaboration function is actually two functions: one is the 5GB OneDrive cloud storage space and automatic storage function; the other is the real-time collaboration function that I just mentioned panning from Microsoft 365, as shown above, others have changed The content will be displayed in the document in the form of comments. Click the share button in the upper right corner of the window to send the link of the file in OneDrive to others by email, or copy the link separately and share it with others through instant messaging software such as WeChat and QQ. The comment button next to it lets you send comments to all co-authors, and you can even preset when to send comments. The Office background and theme can be adjusted in the account options. The theme supports several options of color, dark gray, black, white and synchronization with system settings. Black is also the "night mode" mentioned when the preview version was released. Going down, using a black or gray theme can indeed reduce visual fatigue, but it can only change the color of the text relative to the background color, not the color of the picture. Immersive Reader is a new feature in Word. Compared with the original focus mode, which hides the menu bar and toolbar, it can set the reading text to highlight one, three or five lines, and can also adjust the column width, The kerning and page color can be adjusted, and it can be supplemented by voice reading, bringing a more focused reading method. Finally, I also want to talk about the installation of Office 2021, as a reference for friends who have been using the OEM version (mainly for users who have authorized the retail version): The first method is to directly download the Office 2021 ISO image file from Microsoft's official website for installation. Select the corresponding version you purchased to download; the second method is to download and install through the deployment tool Office Tool Plus (OTP), which is also downloaded from the official website. There are two points to pay attention to during the period: one is to download and remember the Runtime version, the other is to uninstall the old version before installation, and the other versions can be installed according to the map and the key according to the authorized version. In addition, through this tool, you can only install the applications you need, and you can uninstall them or not install them if you don't use them every day. As I said just now, Microsoft 365 is actually an on-demand subscription service that uses the latest version of Office, currently Office 2021. In addition, in addition to its larger cloud storage space, it also has a commercial version of interactive software. We have seen that the new version has been replaced from Skype to Teams. During the epidemic, you have used it more or less to hold online meetings. . Compared with Office 2021, Microsoft 365 compatible hardware terminals are more abundant. In addition to Windows PCs, tablets and Mac computers, it also supports Chromebooks, iPads, and Apple and Android smartphones, and can automatically adapt to the screen aspect ratio of various devices. . Although Office 2021 is also free to install on tablets and smartphones, its interface has only basic functions, while Microsoft 365 has more functional support. In Microsoft's planning, the definition of Microsoft 365 is "much more than Office", so when Office 2019 was released, it was officially renamed from Office 365 to Microsoft 365. On the new Microsoft 365, we could see more advanced features built on top of Office 2021. Microsoft 365 can be said to build a framework for the future consumer business, but I think Microsoft's ambition is far more than binding our work, and even hopes that this platform can be involved in our lives. The current Microsoft 365 still locks advanced applications on enhancing creativity, and each software in Office 2021 provides intelligent assistance functions and advanced creative functions. Take Microsoft Editor, for example, which can check grammar and spelling, and suggest revisions. And users who subscribe to Microsoft 365 can also have an advanced version editor that checks whether the expression is clear and concise, has the function of learning vocabulary, punctuation and other content, supports more than 20 languages, and can be used in different Gmail, LinkedIn, Google docs, etc. It is used in the software environment. In the past, this was a function only possessed by professional writing software. I also mentioned the ink writing and conversion function just now. It is a function derived from the touch screen and stylus based on the hardware. Users can directly write mathematical formulas or chemical equations on the screen, and automatically convert them to print and insert them into documents. You can also add handwritten annotations and signatures to documents, and some signature files do not need to be printed out and then scanned into electronic files, which greatly improves work efficiency; in addition, handwritten text and shapes can be intelligently converted into printed form, which is convenient for generating official documents Or published and used in teaching materials. These applications are typical education, scientific research and business applications, and the scope of application is very wide. Word citation and bibliography is a professional function for education and scientific research personnel to write papers. It can be integrated with commonly used document management software to easily insert citations and bibliographies, simplifying the writing process of papers and scientific research documents; and can flexibly adjust citation styles according to specific requirements to avoid Repeated revisions and adjustments can update citations and bibliographies with just one click. The operation is very convenient, and these functions are also very useful in the publishing industry. In PowerPoint software, authorized users of Microsoft 365 can analyze the text, pictures, shapes and other materials in PPT through AI, and provide professional beautification and typesetting suggestions. If the user is satisfied with the recommended typesetting materials and templates, the full text can be applied with one click, so that we no longer spend time on PPT typesetting, so we can focus on writing or creation. Real-time subtitles in PowerPoint is a revolutionary feature that not only automatically generates real-time subtitles, but also translates speeches into other languages ​​in real-time, which is equivalent to simultaneous interpretation-level translation. On the one hand, this function takes care of the hearing-impaired, and can also provide a very convenient way of communication in multinational enterprises or foreign trade activities, without the need to hire expensive simultaneous interpreters. In Excel, authorized users of Microsoft 365 can analyze the data in the table with the help of AI function, find the trend, and automatically generate a variety of charts and pivot chart suggestions. When data analysis results and charts are needed, they can be inserted with one click. , even users who do not understand data analysis technology can easily complete it, which greatly reduces the threshold for this work. The smart chart function is another new highlight in Excel. Users can not only choose from 17 different categories of charts, but also get the most suitable chart type recommendation through automatic analysis of data characteristics. Best of all, it can dynamically present data including geographic locations on a 2D or 3D map. In the past, we always used Outlook as a tool for sending and receiving emails. The new Outlook can also manage content such as calendars, tasks and contacts. We can not only arrange work meetings on it, but also arrange school assignments, family gatherings and other information on the calendar. In terms of time tasks, it can be called a time management master (schedule management and email management on mobile phones are separated, and the use efficiency is not as good as Outlook). The "Focused Inbox" on Outlook is a software for quickly classifying emails, and you can use the pre-set "suggested replies" to reply to this category of emails with one click, and even when you are offline, you can automatically reply. So there is no need to log in to the mailbox from time to time to reply to some unimportant emails. In the use of Outlook, we might as well refer to how Microsoft's staff use it. When going to work (self-driving or public transportation) every day, you can use your mobile phone to log in to Outlook, read the title of the email through the Bluetooth headset, choose whether to read the specific content, and select the suggested reply according to the content. All the emails from the previous day can be processed during the commute time. The company has time to make a nice cup of coffee for itself. Having 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage is a "privilege" for Microsoft 365 authorized users, and it means not only more cloud storage, but also auto-save, version control, and sync across devices. It also means that 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage can be shared across all your Microsoft 365 devices, from phones to tablets, and all PCs. Even if the hardware device is damaged or lost, we can still retrieve important files in the OneDrive account. Its automatic backup function can not only set up Office file backup, but also include desktop, pictures, documents, videos and other local folders into the automatic backup function. , and all the backed up content can be accessed across devices. Microsoft wants to make OneDrive a vault for important data and personal identities, so it also offers a "personal vault" software. The software is unlocked through a variety of user verification mechanisms such as fingerprints, face recognition, and text messages, and is automatically locked after use. Users can safely put electronic versions of important documents such as certificates and receipts in it, and also support cross-device access. Microsoft puts a variety of more intelligent tools, more secure, massive cloud services and time management software across work and life on top of Microsoft 365. The significance is to provide users with an all-round productivity tool, rather than Simple office software. In my opinion, there is still huge room for imagination in this nine-square grid. Still, Microsoft's ambition is to build Microsoft 365 into a personal all-round assistant that spans work and life.