Microsoft this week for the first time offered its Office for Mac applications in Apple's Mac App Store.
The Office applications - Excel, Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive, PowerPoint and Word - can be downloaded separately or as a bundled collection from the Mac App Store, Apple's e-market.
While the applications can be downloaded - and even run in a reduced functionality mode that bars actions like creating and editing documents, and sending and receiving email - the customer must already subscribe to Office 365 or obtain a subscription through an in-app purchase to unlock their full potential. If the latter, people have a choice between the $100-per-year Office 365 Home (alternately, $10 per month) and the $70 Office 365 Personal ($7 per month).
It's unclear whether Apple will scrape its usual 30% off the top of Office 365 in-app purchases - as it does for all app revenue - or if Apple and Microsoft came to a different financial agreement.
Enterprises can also leverage the Mac App Store by using the Apple Business Manager dashboard to distribute the Office 365 applications to employees covered by corporate-grade subscriptions such as Office 365 Business or Office 365 Enterprise E3.
The applications are not any different from the ones Microsoft offers for download from its website or from a customer's Office 365 web-based control panel. They do differ, however, from those covered by retail "perpetual" licenses, including Office Home & Student 2019 (a $150 one-time purchase) and Office Home & Business 2019 ($250).
ne of the advantages of acquiring Office 365 through the Mac App Store is that the market then delivers updates and upgrades, rather than the Microsoft-made AutoUpdate app on macOS. There is no difference between the purchase price through the Mac App Store and via Microsoft's website. Discounts, however, can be found at online outlets like Amazon, where "Key Card" options were priced today at $88.21 for Office 365 Home and $58.99 for Office 365 Personal.
Apple first announced that the Office applications would land in the Mac App Store in June 2018, during its annual developers conference. The Mac App Store has been in operation since January 2011. Unlike the iOS App Store, the one for the Mac is not the sole distribution platform for macOS software; developers can sell their wares from their own websites, for example, or in packaged form through online or brick-and-mortar retail stores.
A short FAQ on Office in the Mac App Store provides additional information about the applications and Office 365.
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.
Microsoft today announced name changes to the Office 365 subscription plans in the Business line, substituting "Microsoft 365" instead.
The Redmond, Wash. developer did not touch subscription plans aimed at enterprise, education and government.
Plan names will automatically change on April 21, Microsoft said in an online statement. Prices of the plans will not change.
Office 365 Business Essentials, the lowest-priced plan in the Business line, will become Microsoft 365 Business Basic.
Office 365 Business, the middling plan in the trio that provides the Office applications and OneDrive, but no other services, will become Microsoft 365 Apps.
Office 365 Business Premium, the most capable and most expensive subscription plan of the three, will become Microsoft 365 Business Standard.
Microsoft will change the moniker of Microsoft 365 Business to Microsoft 365 Business Premium to fit it into the Business line as the top-dollar $20 per-user per-month plan. That subscription adds security and management tools to Office 365 Business Standard, née Premium. (Currently, this is the lowest-priced plan in the Microsoft 365 line. After the name changes, though, it will fall somewhere in the middle.)
Finally, the orphan of Office 365, the Office 365 ProPlus deal, which like Office 365 Business limits the bits to the Office applications and OneDrive, will get the same Microsoft 365 Apps nameplate. (Microsoft said if it needed to differentiate the two, it would append "for business" and "for enterprise" on the offerings.)
Subscription label changes aside, everything will remain untouched. "There are no price or feature changes to plans at this time (emphasis added)," Microsoft said in a short Q&A embedded in the announcement.
"We want our products to reflect the range of features and benefits in the subscription," the company noted, again in the Q&A. Specifically, Microsoft pointed to past additions to Office 365 Business Essentials and Business Premium plans, notably the Teams collaboration, video conferencing and online meeting software, as justifying a step up in naming.
"Second, we're always looking for ways to simplify," the company continued. "This new approach to naming our products is designed to help you quickly find the plan you need and get back to your business."
Microsoft's second reason was the weaker of the two.
Ever since the 2017 introduction of Microsoft 365 as a subscription plan label, Microsoft has had an identity problem, with that line and the much older Office 365 crossing streams. Just what was Microsoft 365? How was it different -- better than, by price anyway -- from the original?
Initially, Microsoft 365 was an über-suite, an über-subscription, for it started with Office 365, then added more, most importantly a subscription to Windows 10. Microsoft 365, then, was Office 365 + Windows 10. (It was more, but those pieces were the most important.)
Microsoft could be applauded by bringing more of its subscriptions under the Microsoft 365 moniker - that's clearly the name that will rule all at some point - but the brand remains scatter-brained. Some subscriptions are for consumers, as Microsoft also today announced an Office 365-to-Microsoft 365 name change for its Personal and Home deals; others are for business but sans Windows 10; yet more are for enterprises wishing for the kitchen sink, Windows included.
That's not a brand, that's just a mob.
And a large swath of Microsoft's plans will remain, at least for now, tapped as Office 365, including all the enterprise-, education- and government-aimed subscriptions, ranging from Office 365 A1 to Office 365 E5. To crowd those plans under a Microsoft 365 umbrella will take some doing, as the company will have to figure out how to untangle the duplicate x3 and x5 suffixes.
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 on Wednesday issued a preview of Office for the Mac that will run natively on Apple's upcoming ARM-based laptops.
The Redmond, Wash. company also modified its Intel-based macOS Office applications so that they run on Apple's newest, Big Sur, and have been optimized for translation by Rosetta 2 — the built-in technology that makes it possible to run older software on the ARM silicon inside the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini.
In effect, Microsoft now has two lines of Office for the Mac.
The latest, a Universal App iteration of Office, was released to the Beta channel of Office Insider, Microsoft's preview program, on Nov. 11, according to Erik Schwiebert, a principal software engineer for Apple products at Microsoft. A Universal App is one with binaries that run on Intel-based and Apple Silicon Mac hardware.
(On Tuesday, Apple unveiled three Mac models powered by its own ARM-based silicon, a system-on-a-chip (SoC) dubbed M1. While those machines — configurations of the MacBook Air, the 13-in. MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini — can be ordered now, they are to be delivered to buyers in a few days and reach retail on Nov. 17.)
Users must have an Office 365 or Microsoft 365 account to join Office Insider, and thus experiment with the Beta of the Office Universal App. Instructions on installing the Beta are available here.
Also this month, Microsoft updated the Office applications — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and OneDrive — to include "the latest optimizations for macOS Big Sur, which is the first operating system to support Apple Silicon."
On M1-powered systems, Big Sur — aka macOS 11 — relies on Rosetta 2 to run existing Intel-based applications. Rosetta does this by translating Intel-based code into code that runs on the M1 SoC. Rather than do that in real time, again and again each time the application is launched, Rosetta 2 can do the translation once, prior to the first time the app is run on Apple silicon, then stores the translated code for subsequent use.
Microsoft on Tuesday released native versions of its core Office productivity applications for Apple's new ARM-based notebooks.
Collectively tagged as Microsoft 365 for Mac Apps — formerly labeled Office 365 ProPlus — the flagship applications Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word have been updated so that they run on the Apple Silicon-powered MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini without requiring translation.
On systems powered by Apple's new M1 system-on-a-chip, macOS 11 — aka Big Sur — uses the Rosetta 2 technology to run existing Intel-based applications. Rosetta 2 translates Intel-based code into code that runs on the M1 SoC.
Rather than translate the code again and again each time the application is launched, Rosetta 2 does the translation once, prior to the first time the app is run, then stores the translated code for subsequent use. On the other hand, native applications do not require such translation and thus launch faster than Intel apps.
To eliminate confusion, developers can packages both the native and Intel versions of an app into a single binary, called a Universal App.
(If all this sounds vaguely familiar to long-time Mac users, it should: The initial iterations of Rosetta and Universal Apps debuted in 2006 with OS X Tiger, to run applications written for the PowerPC processor on then-new Intel-based Macs.)
Users with automatic updates enabled will start to receive the M1-native apps today. Alternately, users can choose App Store from the Apple menu, then select Updates, or from an Office application, pick Check for Updates from its Help menu.
Teams, the Office most aggressively promoted by Microsoft this year, has yet to appear in a Universal App edition for M1 Macs.
"Teams is currently available in Rosetta [2] emulation mode on Macs with M1 and [in] the browser," wrote Bill Doll, a senior product marketing manager, in a post to a Microsoft blog. "We are working on universal app support for M1 Macs and will share more news as our work progresses."
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.
