Microsoft Windows may get all the press coverage, but when you want to get real work done, you turn your attention to the applications that run on it. And if you use spreadsheets, that generally means Excel.
Excel is, of course, part of Microsoft’s Office suite of productivity tools. Microsoft sells Office under two models: Individuals and businesses can pay for the software license up front and own it forever (what the company calls the “perpetual” version of the suite), or they can purchase an Office 365 subscription, which means they have access to the software for only as long as they keep paying the subscription fee.
When you purchase a perpetual version of the suite — say, Office 2016 or Office 2019 — its applications will never get new features, whereas Office 365 apps are continually updated with new features.
This cheat sheet gets you up to speed on the features that were introduced in Excel 2016 and Excel 2019, the perpetual-license versions of Excel included with Office 2016 and Office 2019, respectively. In Office 365, Excel has all those features, plus several more.
Most of the tips in this article apply to both Excel 2016 and 2019 for Windows. Near the end is a section for Excel 2019 only.
Share this story: IT folks, we hope you'll pass this guide on to your users to help them learn to get the most from Excel 2016 and 2019.
Use the Ribbon
The Ribbon interface that you came to know and love (or perhaps hate) in earlier versions of Excel hasn’t changed much in Excel 2016 or 2019. Since the Ribbon has been included in Office suite applications since Office 2007, we assume that by now you’re familiar with how it works.
As in Excel 2013, the Ribbon in Excel 2016 and 2019 has a flattened look that’s cleaner and less cluttered than in Excel 2010 and 2007. The 2016 and 2019 Ribbon is smaller than it was in Excel 2013, the title bar is solid green rather than white, and the text for the Ribbon tabs (File, Home, Insert and so on) is a mix of upper- and lowercase rather than all caps. But it still works in the same way, and you’ll find most of the commands in the same locations as in earlier versions.
Just as in previous versions of Excel, if you want the Ribbon to go away, press Ctrl-F1. To make it appear again, press Ctrl-F1 and it comes back.
You’ve got other options for displaying the Ribbon as well. To get to them, click the Ribbon Display Options icon at the top right of the screen, just to the left of the icons for minimizing and maximizing PowerPoint. A drop-down menu appears with these three options:
Auto-hide Ribbon: This hides the entire Ribbon, both the tabs and commands underneath them. To show the Ribbon again, click at the top of PowerPoint.
Show Tabs: This shows the tabs but hides the commands underneath them. It’s the same as pressing Ctrl-F1. To display the commands underneath the tabs when they’re hidden, press Ctrl-F1, click a tab, or click the Ribbon display icon and select “Show Tabs and Commands.”
Show Tabs and Commands: Selecting this shows both the tabs and commands.
And if for some reason that nice green color on the title bar is just too much for you, you can turn it white or gray. (In Excel 2019, there’s also a black option.) To do it, select File > Options > General. In the “Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office” section, click the down arrow next to Office Theme, and select Dark Gray or White (or Black) from the drop-down menu. To make the title bar green again, instead choose the “Colorful” option from the drop-down list. Just above the Office Theme menu is an Office Background drop-down menu — here you can choose to display a pattern such as a circuit board or circles and stripes in the title bar.
There’s a very useful feature in what Microsoft calls the backstage area that appears when you click File on the Ribbon: If you click Open or Save As from the menu on the left, you can see the cloud-based services you’ve connected to your Office account, such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Each location now displays its associated email address underneath it. This is quite helpful if you use a cloud service with more than one account, such as if you have one OneDrive account for personal use and another one for business. You’ll be able to see at a glance which is which.
Get things done quickly with Tell Me
Excel has never been the most user-friendly of applications, and it has so many powerful features it can be tough to use. Microsoft has made it easier with a feature in Excel 2016 and 2019 called Tell Me, which puts even buried tools in easy reach.
To use it, click the “Tell me what you want to do” text to the right of the View tab on the Ribbon. (Keyboard fans can instead press Alt-Q.) Then type in a task you want to do, such as “create a pivot table.” You’ll get a menu showing potential matches for the task. In this instance, the top result is a direct link to the form for creating a PivotTable — select it and you’ll start creating the PivotTable right away, without having to go to the Ribbon’s Insert tab first.
If you’d like more information about your task, the last two items that appear in the Tell Me menu let you select from related Help topics or search for your phrase using Smart Lookup. (More on Smart Lookup below.)
Even if you consider yourself a spreadsheet jockey, it’ll be worth your while trying out Tell Me. It’s a big time-saver, and far more efficient than hunting through the Ribbon to find a command. Also useful is that it remembers the features you’ve previously clicked on in the box, so when you click in it, you first see a list of previous tasks you’ve searched for. That makes sure that tasks that you frequently perform are always within easy reach. And it puts tasks you rarely do within easy reach as well.
Use Smart Lookup for online research
Another new feature, Smart Lookup, lets you do research while you’re working on a spreadsheet. Right-click a cell with a word or group of words in it, and from the menu that appears, select Smart Lookup.
When you do that, Excel uses Microsoft’s Bing search engine to do a web search on the word or words, then displays definitions, any related Wikipedia entries, and other results from the web in the Smart Lookup pane that appears on the right. Click any result link to open the full page in a browser. If you just want a definition of the word, click the Define tab in the pane. If you want more information, click the Explore tab in the pane.
For generic terms, such as “payback period” or “ROI,” it works well. But don’t expect Smart Lookup to research financial information that you might want to put into your spreadsheet, at least based on my experience. When I did a Smart Lookup on “Inflation rate in France 2016,” for example, I got results for the UEFA Euro 2016 soccer tournament, and other information telling me that 2016 was a leap year. And when I searched for “Steel output United States,” Smart Lookup pulled up the Wikipedia entry for the United States.
Note that in order to use Smart Lookup in Excel or any other Office app, you might first need to enable Microsoft’s intelligent services feature, which collects your search terms and some content from your spreadsheets and other documents. (If you’re concerned about privacy, you’ll need to weigh whether the privacy hit is worth the convenience of doing research from right within the app.) If you haven’t enabled it, you’ll see a screen when you click Smart Lookup asking you to turn it on. Once you do so, it will be turned on across all your Office applications.
Chart the new chart types
Spreadsheets aren’t just about raw data — they’re about charts as well. Charts are great for visualizing and presenting data, and for gaining insights from it. To that end, Excel 2016 has six new chart types, including most notably a histogram (frequently used in statistics), a “waterfall” that’s effective at showing running financial totals, and a hierarchical treemap that helps you find patterns in data. (Excel 2019 has two more new chart types, which we'll cover later in the story.) Note that the new charts are available only if you’re working in an .xlsx document. If you use the older .xls format, you won’t find them.
To see all the new charts, put your cursor in a cell or group of cells that contains data, select Insert > Recommended Charts and click the All Charts tab. You’ll find the new charts, mixed in with the older ones. Select any to create the chart.
These are the six new chart types:
Treemap. This chart type creates a hierarchical view of your data, with top-level categories (or tree branches) shown as rectangles, and with subcategories (or sub-branches) shown as smaller rectangles grouped inside the larger ones. Thus, you can easily compare the sizes of top-level categories and subcategories in a single view. For instance, a bookstore can see at a glance that it brings in more revenue from 1st Readers, a subcategory of Children’s Books, than for the entire Non-fiction top-level category.
Sunburst. This chart type also displays hierarchical data, but in a multi-level pie chart. Each level of the hierarchy is represented by a circle. The innermost circle contains the top-level categories, the next circle out shows subcategories, the circle after that subsubcategories and so on.
Sunbursts are best for showing the relationships among categories and subcategories, while treemaps are better at showing the relative sizes of categories and subcategories.
Waterfall. This chart type is well-suited for visualizing financial statements. It displays a running total of the positive and negative contributions toward a final net value.
Histogram. This kind of chart shows frequencies within a data set. It could, for example, show the number of books sold in specific price ranges in a bookstore.
Pareto. This chart, also known as a sorted histogram, contains bars as well as a line graph. Values are represented in descending order by bars. The cumulative total percentage of each bar is represented by a rising line. In the bookstore example, each bar could show a reason for a book being returned (defective, priced incorrectly, and so on). The chart would show, at a glance, the primary reasons for returns, so a bookstore owner could focus on those issues.
Note that the Pareto chart does not show up when you select Insert > Recommended Charts > All Charts. To use it, first select the data you want to chart, then select Insert > Insert Statistic Chart, and under Histogram, choose Pareto.
Box & Whisker. This chart, like a histogram, shows frequencies within a data set but provides for a deeper analysis than a histogram. For example, in a bookstore it could show the distribution of prices of different genres of books. In the example shown here, each “box” represents the first to third quartile of prices for books in that genre, while the “whiskers” (the lines extending up and down from the box) show the upper and lower range of prices. Outliers that are priced outside the whiskers are shown as dots, the median price for each genre is shown with a horizontal line across the box, and the mean price is shown with an x.
Collaborate live with Excel Online
When Office 2016 was released, the most trumpeted new feature was real-time collaboration that let people work simultaneously with each other on documents no matter where they were, as long as they had internet connections. (Microsoft calls this “co-authoring.”) When you collaborate with others live, everyone with access to a document can work on it simultaneously, with everyone seeing what everyone else does as they edit.
But Excel was left out in the cold for live collaboration. Only Word, PowerPoint and OneNote had that feature, with Microsoft saying that at some undetermined time, Excel would be given live collaboration.
Many people (myself included) expected that Excel 2019 would get co-authoring features, but that’s not the case. To get live collaboration in the Excel desktop client, you have to be an Office 365 subscriber.
Perpetual-license Excel 2016 and 2019 users can, however, collaborate live using the web-based version of Excel, and I’ll show you how to do that here. Excel Online is less powerful and polished than the Excel desktop client, but it works well enough if you want to collaborate in real time.
To collaborate using the online version of Excel, the file you want to share needs to be in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint or Dropbox. To start, head to Excel Online by going to office.com; then sign in using your Microsoft ID and click the Excel button. When Excel runs, open the file you want to share.
Next, click the Share button at the top right of the screen. A screen pops up over Excel. In it, enter the email address of the person with whom you want to share. If you want to share with more than one person, enter multiple email addresses. Then type in a note if you want.
If you’re signed in with an individual Microsoft account, the people you share the document with can edit the document by default; however, you can give them read-only access instead by clicking the “Recipients can edit” link under the “Add a quick note” area and choosing “Recipients can only view” from the drop-down list. When you do that, you’ll also see an option to designate whether recipients need to be signed in with a Microsoft account to see the workbook. When you’re ready, click the Share button.
When you’re done, a screen pops up confirming to whom you’ve sent the email, and whether they can edit or only read the document. You can click that drop-down to change their permissions or stop sharing the workbook. On this screen you can also send another email to share with others, by clicking the “Invite people” link in the left pane. When you’re done with the screen, click Close.
If you’re signed in with a corporate account, the process is slightly more streamlined. On the initial pop-up screen where you enter recipients’ emails, you’ll see a box that says, “Only the people you specify who have this link can edit.” Click it and you’ll see a screen with more sharing options, including anyone, people in your organization, and people with existing access. There’s also a checkbox to allow them to edit the workbook or not. Make your selections and click Apply. Then, back on the first pop-up, click Send.
Excel now sends an email to all the people with whom you want to collaborate. When they click the “View in OneDrive” or “Open” button, they’ll open the spreadsheet. At this point, they can view the spreadsheet, but not edit it. To edit it, they need to click the Edit in Browser button at the top of the screen or click the Edit Workbook menu and select Edit in Browser. They can then edit the document right in their browser window.
Everyone using the document sees the changes that other people make in real time. Each person’s presence is indicated by a colored cursor, and everyone gets a different color. As they take actions, such as entering data into a cell or creating a chart, their work instantly appears to everyone else.
On the upper right of the screen is a list of everyone collaborating on the document. Click a name to see the location of the cell they’re currently working on (for example, G11). You can also hover your mouse over someone’s colored cursor and see their name.
Chat isn’t available. But if you click the Skype icon on the upper right of the screen, you can launch Skype, see if they’re on the service, and communicate with them that way.
Note that even the owner of the workbook must be using Excel Online in order to collaborate in real time. If you have the workbook open in a perpetual version of the Excel 2016 or 2019 desktop client, no one else will be able to make changes in their browser; they’ll see a message saying the file is locked. If you’re using Excel Online, everybody can make changes (assuming you’ve given them editing privileges). When everybody is done making changes and no longer has the workbook open in their browser, you can reopen the file in the Excel 2016 or 2019 desktop client.
Companies have scattered to the wind, once-formidable armies of workers enclosed in glass buildings now sundered, each employee at his or her own outpost, whether kitchen table, home office desk or lap in a quasi-quiet corner.
Flinging employees off the workplace carousel may have been as simple as a single "Go home" order, but ensuring that those workers can do their work from home and be productive at it (or even partially productive), takes work — a lot of work.
The suddenness of the exodus from the office may also have left management, IT and even employees unprepared for the shift. Core and work-critical tools, Microsoft Office among them, may be missing. But money doesn't grow on trees, not in times of cholera or coronavirus.
Getting Office to sent-home employees won't be simple. If the firm has stuck with on-premises, perpetually-licensed solutions, beginning to hybridize infrastructure by moving some of it to the cloud will be rough. And if IT hasn't had a lot of experience dealing with remote workers, there's a steep learning curve ahead.
But there are ways to cut costs and save money when the first order of business is to get everyone working on business. Computerworld has compiled several of the best options, some for shops that rely on Office 2010, 2013, 2016 or 2019, others for enterprises partly or completely in on Office 365.
Stay healthy. Stay in business.
If your company relies on Office (perpetual)
Office's perpetual version is the one that a firm purchases once with an up-front payment, typically as part of a volume licensing deal. That payment provides the rights to run the suite as long as one wants, long after Microsoft stops serving security updates if you're willing to take risks. It can be installed on just one PC or Mac, and so is tied to that device, not to its current user.
That means if these devices stayed at the workplace when employees were sent home to work, there are no Office licenses available for the worker to install on his or her personal laptop.
Subscribe to Office 365 E1 or Office 365 Business Essentials
These two plans — the former for firms of all sizes, the latter only for companies that purchase 300 or fewer seats — are among the least expensive Office 365 subscriptions. Office 365 E1 runs $8 per month per user (when paid for in a single lump sum for an entire year; more on that later). Office 365 Business Essentials costs $5 per user per month (again, when bought in an annual lump sum).
Neither plan provides the desktop Office applications found in Office perpetual, instead offering the web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Both also provide Teams, Microsoft's collaboration/video conferencing software, which many businesses have begun using — or are using much more often now — to communicate and meet with now-at-home employees.
The idea here is that these Office 365 licenses are considerably less expensive than purchasing, say, a second Office 2019 license for an employee to use during the crisis. And while the web apps are not the equal of the desktop applications, they should serve for the unknown-but-not-infinite time workers will work from home.
Pay on a month-by-month basis
No one knows exactly when it will be prudent to return to working in large groups. Even experts are wary of guessing.
With that in mind, it seems smart to pay for "bridge" Office 365 plans like Enterprise E1 or Business Essentials on a month-by-month basis, not in a lump sum for a full year.
Office 365 Business Essentials, for example, costs $6 per user per month when paid month-by-month (and thus with only a monthly commitment). If the work-at-home stretch for employees needing the plan runs nine or fewer months, then, month-by-month payments will save money over the annual rate and commitment.
Partake of free-trial offers
Small businesses that were mulling moving to Office 365 and its always-updated/rent-not-buy model before the COVID-19 pandemic upended everything — and are still pondering the change — should take advantage of Microsoft's free one-month trials.
Office 365 Business Premium, a subscription plan that includes the desktop Office applications — Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook for both Windows and macOS; Publisher and Access for Windows only — costs $12.50 per user per month (when paid for in an annual lump sum) or $15 per user per month (when paid on a month-to-month basis). Microsoft offers a 30-day free trial to the plan for up to 25 users.
If your company relies on Office 365
Organizations already armed with Office 365 — the by-subscription service whereby customers pay Microsoft an ongoing fee annually or monthly for the right to run the suite and numerous services — have an edge when their workers get spread from here to Timbuktu. That's because the subscription is licensed per user, not per device, allowing each employee to install the applications on multiple devices, including personal hardware they have at home. (There are many more reasons to give Office 365 the advantage here, but that's enough for now.)
Get the Office each worker can use
Not everyone who has been suddenly told to work remotely will have a PC or Mac at home. But virtually everyone has a smartphone.
"The first challenge of shifting to working remote — especially on short notice — is being disconnected," Yana Terukhova, who leads product marketing strategy for Excel, wrote in a March 19 post to a company blog.
She then ticked off the mobile apps licensed to most users of Office 365, including the Outlook email app for iOS or Android, and the new Word-Excel-PowerPoint combo app for the two operating systems.
Even entry-level Office 365 plans, such as Office 365 Business Essentials, which costs $6 per user per month when paid on a month-to-month basis, include rights to iOS and Android Office apps.
Depending on the employee's role in the organization, a personal smartphone may be all someone needs to do the job — or a large portion of it.
Get Teams for free for employees without it
Although Teams is included with most Office 365 Business and Office 365 Enterprise plans, there are exceptions, including Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus. And then there are the employees who aren't assigned an Office 365 license because of their work roles.
The company needs a way to communicate with everyone on the payroll.
Microsoft has a program called "Microsoft Teams Exploratory" that lets employees with an Azure Active Directory-managed email address request a Teams license. (The request must be initiated by the user; it cannot be claimed by an administrator for a user.) The no-charge license will be good until the company's next enterprise agreement anniversary or subscription renewal, during or after January 2021.
More information, including how administrators can manage the Teams license, can be found in this support document.
More Teams for free
Another way to equip employees with Teams — and other Office bits, including commercial rights to the web and mobile apps — is with a Microsoft free offer of Office 365 E1. The deal, which Microsoft first mentioned earlier this month, awards E1 for a six-month stretch.
The lowest-priced Enterprise plan — $8 per user per month when paid for in an annual sum — includes Teams, as well as online storage (OneDrive), email (Exchange), and the web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Also part of the plan: Mobile Office apps for iOS and Android.
This offer is aimed at enterprises or other organizations with existing relationships with Microsoft sales or a reselling partner. "Contact your Microsoft partner or sales representative," said Jared Spataro, a Microsoft executive, in a March 5 post to a company blog.
Microsoft has also waived the usual requirements for its FastTrack support for the free Office 365 E1 trial. FastTrack will assist customers getting workers on board E1 from March through August of this year, the company said.
Tell workers to self-install Office on their PC or Mac
When employees suddenly at home freak out that they can't work without Office, then get on the horn with the also-working-from-home help desk asking what to do, the answer may not cost the company a dime. That's because an employee already covered by an Office 365 plan can self-install Office on his or her own Windows PC or Mac machine.
IT staffers can point users to this support document, which describes the steps of signing on to office.com, downloading and installing the suite.
Word has always been the workhorse app of the Microsoft Office suite. Nearly everyone who uses Office ends up using Word at some point, whether it be for writing memos, typing up agendas, creating reports, crafting business correspondence or any of a thousand other uses.
Microsoft sells Office under two models: Individuals and businesses can pay for the software license up front and own it forever (what the company calls the “perpetual” version of the suite), or they can purchase an Office 365 subscription, which means they have access to the software for only as long as they keep paying the subscription fee.
When you purchase a perpetual version of the suite — say, Office 2016 or Office 2019 — its applications will never get new features, whereas Office 365 apps are continually updated with new features. For more details, see “What are the differences between Microsoft Office 2019 and Office 365?”
This cheat sheet gets you up to speed on the features that have been introduced in Office 365’s Word for Windows desktop client since 2015. We’ll periodically update this story as new features roll out. (If you’re using the perpetual-license Word 2016 or 2019, see our separate Word 2016 and 2019 cheat sheet.)
Use the Ribbon
The Ribbon interface is alive and well in the current version of Word. Since it has been included in Office applications since Office 2007, you’re probably familiar with how it works.
In September 2018, Microsoft overhauled the way the Ribbon looks. It’s now flatter-looking, cleaner and less cluttered, and has high-contrast colors, which makes the icons and text on the Ribbon easier to see. The blue bar at the top has been reduced as well, with the tab names now appearing on a gray background. But it still works in the same way, and you’ll find most of the commands in the same locations as in earlier versions.
One minor change to the Ribbon layout is that there’s now a Help tab to the right of the View tab. And there are slight variations in the Ribbon’s appearance between editions of Word in Office 365. For instance, the Search box is located to the right of the Ribbon tabs in consumer editions but above the Ribbon tabs in enterprise editions.
To find out which commands live on which tabs on the Ribbon, download our Word for Office 365 Ribbon quick reference. Also note that you can use the search box on or above the Ribbon to find commands.
Just as in earlier versions of Word, to make the commands underneath the tabs on the Ribbon go away, press Ctrl-F1. (Note that the Ribbon tabs — File, Home, Insert and so on — stay visible.) To make the commands appear again, press Ctrl-F1.
You’ve got other options for displaying the Ribbon as well. To get to them, click the “Ribbon display options” icon at the top right of the screen, just to the left of the icons for minimizing and maximizing Word. A drop-down menu appears with these three options:
Auto-hide Ribbon: This hides the entire Ribbon, both the tabs and commands underneath them. To show the Ribbon again, click at the top of Word.
Show Tabs: This shows the tabs but hides the commands underneath them. It’s the same as pressing Ctrl-F1. To display the commands underneath the tabs when they’re hidden, press Ctrl-F1, click a tab, or click the Ribbon display icon and select “Show Tabs and Commands.”
Show Tabs and Commands: Selecting this shows both the tabs and commands.
And if for some reason that blue on the title bar is too much color for you, you can turn it white, dark gray or black. To do it, select File > Options > General. In the “Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office” section, click the down arrow next to Office Theme and select Dark Gray, Black, or White from the drop-down menu. To make the title bar blue again, choose the Colorful option from the drop-down list. Just above the Office Theme menu is an Office Background drop-down menu — here you can choose to display a pattern such as a circuit board or circles and stripes in the title bar.
There’s a useful feature in what Microsoft calls the backstage area that appears when you click File on the Ribbon: If you click Open, Save a Copy, or Save As from the menu on the left, you can see the cloud-based services you've connected to your Office account, such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Each location now displays its associated email address underneath it. This is quite helpful if you use a cloud service with more than one account, such as if you have one OneDrive account for personal use and another one for business. You'll be able to see at a glance which is which.
In the works: A simplified Ribbon
Microsoft is also working on a simplified version of the Ribbon for all Office applications. Like the existing Ribbon, it will have tabs across the top, and each tab will have commands on it. But it’s more streamlined and uses less space than the existing Ribbon.
For now, only Outlook for Windows uses the simplified Ribbon in Office 365. However, some users can get a preview of what it will look like in Word by going to the online version of Word. Use the slider next to Simplified Ribbon at the top right of the screen to toggle the simplified Ribbon on and off. If you don’t see the slider at the top of the screen, go to the Ribbon’s View tab and check the box next to Simplified Ribbon. To revert to the regular Ribbon, uncheck the box.
In the simplified Ribbon, all the commands are still there for each tab, but only the most commonly used are visible. Click the three-dot icon at the far right end of the Ribbon to show the rest of the commands in a drop-down menu.
In the Outlook desktop client, you can toggle between the streamlined and traditional Ribbon by clicking a small caret icon at the right edge of the Ribbon. We assume this will work the same way in Word, but at this point we have no details. We’ll update this section when the simplified Ribbon rolls out to Word for Windows.
Collaborate in real time
The biggest feature that’s been introduced in Word for Office 365 subscribers since 2015 is real-time collaboration. It lets people work on documents together from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, a feature that Google Docs has long had. Microsoft calls this “co-authoring.”
There are only three requirements for collaboration in Word for Office 365: You must be logged into your Microsoft or Office 365 account; the document must be stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online; and AutoSave must be turned on.
To collaborate on a document, first open it, then click the Share icon in the upper-right part of the screen. If you haven’t yet saved your file in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online, you’ll be prompted to do so. What happens next depends on whether your document is stored in your own OneDrive or with OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online.
If your files are stored in your personal OneDrive, you’ll share documents via the Share pane. But if your files are stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online, you’ll use a newer interface that Microsoft rolled out to enterprise Office 365 users in May 2017. A Microsoft representative told us that the company intends to roll out the newer interface to consumers with an Office 365 subscription at some point, but it hasn’t announced timing yet. So we’ll give instructions for both interfaces below.
If your document is stored in your personal OneDrive: After you’ve saved the document to OneDrive and clicked the Share button, the Share pane will open on the right-hand side of the screen — this is command central for collaboration. At the top of the pane, type in the email addresses of the people with whom you want to collaborate on the document, separated by commas. As you type, Word looks through your address book and displays the matches it finds; click the person you want to invite. If you’re on a corporate network, you can click the address book on the right to search through your corporate email address book. If a person isn’t in your address book, just type in their complete email address.
ocument.
There’s another way to share a file stored in a personal OneDrive for collaboration: At the bottom of the Share pane, click “Get a sharing link,” and from the screen that appears, choose “Create an edit link” if you want to create a link to the file that will allow people to edit the file, or “Create a view-only link” if you want to create a link that will allow them to view the file only. Then copy the link, write an email using any email program, paste in the link, and send the email.
If you want to instead send the file but don’t want to let people collaborate on it, at the bottom of the Share pane click “Send as attachment.” You can then send the file either in Word format or else as a PDF. When you do this, it won’t reflect any changes you make to it after you send the file.
If your document is stored in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business: Clicking the Share button pops up a Send Link window. Here you can send an email with a link where others can access the document.
By default, only the people whose email addresses you enter will be able to edit the document. If you like, you can click “People you specify can edit” to call up a “Link settings” screen, where you can expand access to anyone with the link, people in your organization with the link, or anyone who already has access to the file.
On this screen you can also uncheck the “Allow editing” box to set any of those permissions to read only. If you do that, you can optionally block people from downloading the file by toggling the “Block download” slider on. Finally, if you choose the “Anyone with the link” option, you can set an expiration date after which they won’t be able to access the file. When you’ve made your selections, click Apply.
Back in the main Send Link window, enter the recipients’ email addresses (as you type, Word will suggest people from your address book whom you can select), optionally type in a message, and click Send. An email is sent to all the recipients with a link they can click to open the document. Note that depending on how your IT department has set up permissions for users, you may not be able to send the invitation to people outside your organization.
(If you’d rather send recipients a copy of the workbook as an Excel file or a PDF, and thus not allow real-time collaboration, click Send a Copy at the bottom of the Send Link screen.)
To begin collaborating: When your recipients receive the email from you, they click a button or link to open the document, which opens in Word Online in a web browser rather than in the Word desktop client. Depending on a variety of factors, including whether recipients are signed into an Office 365 account, whether the file being shared is stored in a personal OneDrive or in OneDrive for Business/SharePoint, and whether the sender and recipient are from the same organization, recipients may or may not be able to start editing the document in their browser right away. Some users will have to click an Edit in Browser button first, and some will be able to choose between editing the doc in the browser or editing it in their desktop Word app.
The web version isn’t as fully featured as the client version — for instance, there aren’t as many formatting options and you can’t insert shapes, take screenshots, use mail merge, or use several other features. But for basic editing, it works fine.
When any collaborators open the document, you’ll see a colored cursor bar for each person that indicates their presence in the document. Each person gets their own unique color. Hover your cursor over anybody else’s cursor bar to see their name. Once they begin editing, you can see what each collaborator does as they do it, including deleting, editing and adding text. They see what you do as well.
Collaboration includes the ability to make comments at specific places in a document without actually changing the document’s contents. To do it, place your cursor in the document where you want the comment to appear (or select a word or phrase), click the Comments button in the upper right of the screen, and select New Comment. A new comment box appears in the right margin; type in your comment there. If you want to draw a colleague’s attention to a comment, @ mention them in the comment, they’ll receive an email notification with a link to the document.
Everyone collaborating can see all comments in the right margin. To reply to a comment, hover over it, click the Reply button, and type your response. There’s also a Resolve button that grays out the comment.
Be aware that how well real-time collaboration works depends on the strength of your internet connection. On slow or flaky connections, you won’t immediately see edits that other people make and they won’t see yours immediately — there will be a lag. So it’s always best, when possible, to have the strongest connection possible when collaborating.
If your document is stored in your personal OneDrive, the Share pane shows a list of all people currently collaborating on the workbook or who have been given access to it. If you don’t see the Share pane, click the Share button at the top of the screen to open it.
Double-click any name in the pane, and a screen appears that lets you communicate with them as you work. Email is always available, although that’s not particularly useful for simultaneous collaboration, since back-and-forth may take a while. Instant messaging and making voice calls using VoIP are available, but only via Skype and only if both of you are signed into Skype while you’re working on the document. Click the three-dot icon to the right of their email address, and you’ll be able to add the person to your address book, schedule a meeting with them, and add them to your favorites.
If the Share pane distracts you, click the X on its upper right and it goes away. To make it appear again, click the Share button at the top of the screen.
As noted previously, if your workbook is stored in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business, you won’t have a Share pane. But you can still see who has access to the file by clicking the Share button. In the Send Link screen that opens, click the three-dot icon in the upper right and select Manage Access to see a list of people who can access the file. Here you can change edit/view permissions, revoke someone’s access, or remove the sharing link altogether.
Search to get tasks done quickly
A very useful addition to Word 2016 was called Tell Me — basically, an enhanced search feature for finding commands in Word. Now renamed simply Search, it’s extremely helpful when you want to do a task that you haven’t done before or have forgotten how to do.
To use it, click in the Search box — for some Office 365 subscribers, it’s located on the Ribbon to the right of all the tab headers; for others, it’s above the Ribbon in the blue title area. (Keyboard fans can instead press Alt-Q to go to the Search box.) Type in a task, and you’ll get a list of possible matches. Click the task you want to get instructions on how to do it.
For example, I typed “address an envelope” and chose the “Envelope” result, and the screen you use for addressing envelopes appeared. When I typed in the more general query “write an essay,” it popped up a link to Word’s Researcher feature that lets you do research from right within Word, add sources from the research you find, and then cite the sources in the document properly. If you type in a query and hover your mouse over a result instead of clicking it, you’ll see a screen describing what you can do if you click the results.
It’s a big time-saver, because you don’t have to hunt through the Ribbon to find the command you want. And it remembers the features you've previously selected in the box, so when you click in it, you first see a list of previous tasks you've searched for. That way, tasks that you frequently perform are always within easy reach.
Search is gaining more capabilities, too. Some users of enterprise and education editions of Office 365 are now able to use the Search box to find people in their organization, SharePoint resources, and other personalized results from within Word. (These features are being rolled out in stages, so you might not have them yet.)
Microsoft Office may be the de facto productivity tool for millions of workers worldwide, but it's no monolith. Rather than a single, towering smooth-black Office, there's a whole Stonehenge of options: Office on the iPhone, on iPad, Office on Android smartphones, Office on personal computers, Windows and macOS, Office with a handful of applications, Office with fist-fulls of apps.
But when you get down to it, there are really only two kinds of Office. One, labeled Office 2019, is the stand-alone suite that traces its roots back to the last century. The other, Office 365, is the subscription service that debuted in 2011.
How they differ can be confusing, especially since each includes, more or less, the same applications. Here are three ways to tell these tools apart, and a look at what's coming, based on Microsoft's new support policies for both Office 2019 and Office 365.
How Office is paid for
Of the differences between Office 2019 and Office 365, purchase plans are among the most striking.
Office 2019, whether bought one copy at a time in retail or in lots of hundreds via volume licensing, has been dubbed a "one-time purchase" by Microsoft to spell out how it's paid for. (Labels like "perpetual," which have been widely used by Computerworld, technically note the type of license rather than payment methodology, but in Office's case, the kind of license is tied to whether it was bought outright or simply "rented.")
Microsoft defines the term as when "...you pay a single, up-front cost to get Office applications for one computer." Up-front is the key adjective there; Office 2019's entire purchase price must be laid out before receiving the software.
That purchase, actually of a license to legally run the software, gives the buyer the right to use Office 2019 in perpetuity. In other words, the license has no expiration date, and users may run the suite as long as they want. Pay for Office 2019 this year and use it for the next seven years? Fine. Run it until 2030? Nothing to stop you.
One-time purchases include Office Standard 2019 and Office Professional Plus 2019 (Windows) and Office Standard 2019 for Mac (macOS), the enterprise-grade SKUs available only via volume licensing; and retail packages such as Office Professional 2019 (Windows) and Office Home & Business 2019 (macOS).
Office 365, the purchase method Microsoft pushes most aggressively, is a subscription service, so payments are made monthly or annually. In some rare instances, annual payments may produce savings in exchange for a commitment: Office 365 Business Premium, for example, costs $12.50 per month per user when paid in an annual lump sum ($150 per user), but $15 per month per user on a month-to-month plan ($180).
All enterprise plans - from Enterprise E1 to E5, as well as ProPlus - do not offer a monthly option but require an annual commitment.
Like any subscription, Office 365 provides a service - in this case, the right to run the suite's applications and access the associated services - only as long as payments continue. Stop paying, and rights to run the apps and services expire. (Actually, they don't immediately stop working; everything will continue to operate normally for 30 days past the previous payment's due date.)
A license for Office 365, then, is contingent on sustained payments. Halt the latter and the license is revoked. Restarting the payments restores the license.
Office 365 plans range from one for individual consumers (Office 365 Personal) and small businesses (Office 365 Business) to educational institutions (Office 365 Education E5) and corporations (Office 365 Enterprise E3). Office 365 is also part of Microsoft 365, an even more expensive subscription. The latter comes with labels resembling those of Office 365, including Microsoft 365 Business and Microsoft 365 Enterprise E3.
How each version of Office is serviced
Although payments define one difference between Office 2019 and Office 365, Microsoft's turn to a faster development and release pace is ultimately more important to users - and the IT professionals who support them.
Think of Office 2019 as traditional software made and sold in traditional ways. That holds for servicing, too. Microsoft provides monthly security updates for Office applications, usually on the second Tuesday of each month, and also fixes non-security bugs for the first five years of the SKU's lifecycle.
But Office 2019 does not receive upgrades with new features and functionality. What you get when you buy the suite, feature-wise, is it. If you want to run a new edition, say, Office 2022 (Microsoft has only said it will do another perpetual version, not that it will be so named), you will need to pay another up-front fee to run it.
Office 365, on the other hand, has a completely different servicing model. While the Office applications licensed to users through Office 365 receive the same security patches (and non-security fixes) distributed to Office 2019, they also acquire new features and functionality on a twice-a-year schedule. Those upgrades are issued first in September and March of each year as "Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted), then followed in January and July with "Semi-Annual Channel" releases. This support document explains the update channels of Office 365 ProPlus, the application bundle included in Office 365.
As new features and functionality accrete, the applications evolve until, at some point, Microsoft says they are sufficiently different to warrant a new numerical moniker, such as Office 2022 or Office 2025 (if the perpetual version goes on that long). It will then package those versions into an upgraded suite for customers who continue to make one-time, up-front purchases.
How Office hooks up with cloud services
Neither Office 2019 or Office 365 is truly cloud-based, but both are able to connect with Microsoft's cloud services (and to a very limited extent, some third-party services). Currently, both the applications awarded in a one-time purchase of Office 2019 and those installed as part of an Office 365 subscription can connect with services such as Microsoft-hosted Exchange, OneDrive storage and Skype for Business.
However, in April 2017 Microsoft announced a major change in the rights of perpetual Office. Office 2019's applications - acquired through an up-front purchase of the suite - must be in their "Mainstream" support period, the first five years of the guaranteed lifecycle, to connect with Microsoft's cloud services.
"Office 2019 connections to Office 365 services will be supported until October 2023," Microsoft stated in one support document. (For a while, Microsoft pegged the service cut-off for Office 2016 at October 2020 but within a few months it retreated and said that, like Office 2019, the older suite would connect to Microsoft's cloud services until October 2023.)
The change clearly took aim at customers who mixed cloud services with traditional one-time payment software, because it effectively halved the time the latter could be used in those organizations. At the same time, the post-2023 rule advanced Microsoft's efforts to push business customers toward subscriptions. The company hasn't been shy about saying that Office 365 is, in the end, inevitable.
"Most of our cloud-powered innovation is coming to Office 365 and Microsoft 365. However, we recognize that some customers can't move to the cloud in the near term. We want to support all our customers in their journey to the cloud, at the pace that makes the most sense to them," Microsoft said.
Applications obtained from an Office 365 subscription will never have a connect cutoff date.
How Office will be supported in the future
On Feb. 1, 2018, Microsoft revealed changes in support for Office 2019, even though the "one-time purchase" product had not yet been released. The company also previewed a shape-shift in support for Office 365, specifically the ProPlus component - the desktop productivity applications - slated to take effect in January 2020.
Microsoft plans to slash support for Office 2019.
"Office 2019 will provide 5 years of mainstream support and approximately 2 years of extended support," wrote Jared Spataro, the general manager for Office, in a Feb. 1, 2018, post to a company blog. "This is ... to align with the support period for Office 2016. Extended support will end 10/14/2025." As Spataro implied, Office 2016's support also will come to a stop Oct. 14, 2025.
Office 2016 is to get 10 years of support (five in the "Mainstream" support stretch, five in "Extended"). Office 2019 will get just 7, representing a decrease of 30%. Because Office 2019's Mainstream support will end Oct. 10, 2023, that will be the cut-off for connecting Office 2019's applications to Microsoft's cloud services (see "How Office hooks up with cloud services" above).
Spataro also dissed perpetual Office more explicitly. "It has become imperative to move our software to a more modern cadence," he wrote, implying that years of support for one-time payment software was either onerous for Microsoft or put customers at risk (or both).
Along with the reduction of the support timeline, Microsoft also announced that Office 2019 would be supported only on Windows 10. Even though Windows 7 has until Jan 14, 2020, before it's retired, and Windows 8.1 will have over four years remaining, Office 2019 will not be supported on either.
Meanwhile, Microsoft initially vowed to curtail support for Office 365's ProPlus, too.
A year ago, Microsoft said that after Jan. 14, 2020, only Windows 10 would be supported for running Office 365 ProPlus; that date is the head-to-assisted-living deadline for Windows 7. Windows 8.1 was also to fall off the ProPlus supported list, as was the Windows 10 LTSC (Long-term Servicing Channel) version.
Again, Microsoft blinked. In September, the company changed its mind about cutting off Windows 8.1's access to Office 365 ProPlus.
