Microsoft recently released Office 2019, the most recent version of its Windows and Mac office suite, with useful new features slotted almost seamlessly in to the familiar interface. A distraction-free mode for Word, better pivot tables for Excel, and graphics and support for digital pencils for PowerPoint are just a some of the many tweaks and enhancements towards the venerable Office. While these aren't huge upgrades to the suite, they may be big productivity boons to the right users.

Office 365 users points out that they've had many of these features for a while now, but local software fans will counter that many of them haven't seen a new bill for Office since a minimum of 2016 (when office 2016 was launched), whereas Office 365 users need to pay every single month. Both versions are excellent, of course, and we'll go into the pros and cons of every later within this review.

Pricing, Versions, and Compatibility

As always, Microsoft provides more versions of Office than anyone wants to keep track of. The Office 2019 versions that most individuals will care about are Office Home & Student 2019, at $149.99, which includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and is licensed for just one Windows machine or one Mac only. Office Professional 2019 at $439.99 for just one Windows PC only, adds Outlook, Publisher, and the Access database.

You need Windows 10 (32-bit or 64-bit) for the PC version; older Windows versions aren't supported for Office 2019, although Office 365 will work under Windows 7 until January 2020, when Microsoft stops supporting Windows 7 altogether. (Windows 8 support stop in January 2023.) Around the Mac, you should use the three most recent macOS versions, Sierra, High Sierra, and Mojave.

Subscribe or Buy?

One reason you might not have noticed Office 2019 is the fact that Microsoft would rather publicize its subscription-based office suite Office Home 365, and its business version, rather than pushing you to definitely buy Office 2019. Many corporations, colleges, and government offices prefer what Microsoft calls "perpetual" items like Office 2019 and its predecessor Office 2016, rather than spending annual fees to Microsoft and tying themselves to Microsoft's cloud services.

For most word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation work, the buy-once Office and the subscription-based Office are effectively exactly the same. That said, Office 365 subscription adds real-time collaboration features (such as the excellent Microsoft Teams), high-powered mobile apps, access to cloud-based research and editing tools, and regular infusions of recent features every few months.

In comparison, Office 2019 will remain the same-except for monthly security updates and occasional bug fixes-until you decide to upgrade it to some future version a couple of years from now. Unlike Office 365, Office 2019 doesn't need you to register having a Microsoft account unless you wish to. Users worried about privacy be more effective off ignoring the sign-in button within the title bar of the Office apps altogether. Around the downside, Office 2019 doesn't include access to Office's high-powered mobile apps. I discuss additional explanations why quite a few users may like the buy-once Office 2019 version to the cutting-edge Office 365 version in a later section.

A Familiar Face

Microsoft introduced the Ribbon interface in Office 2007 and hasn't made any comparably drastic interface changes since. Office 2019 need to look familiar to those who have used any version from Office 2007 onwards. To put it simply, Word 2019 is an attractive, but not a compelling upgrade. If you are pleased with Office 2016, think twice before spending hard-earned money on the new version if you don't want or need some of the new version's unique features. Word and Outlook, for example, get a new group of features-called "Learning Tools"-that allow it to be easy to concentrate on text. Spreadsheet app Excel gets new functions and charts, including a funnel style and 2D maps, plus enhanced pivot and query tools.

Additional features

Presentation powerhouse PowerPoint receives a Morph transition that shows separate objects moving to new locations in one slide to the next-matching Apple's Magic Move feature in Keynote. PowerPoint also gets a Zoom feature that lets you jump to the slide or section inside your presentation, without following the traditional linear order-somewhat like the fluid, non-linear presentations pioneered by Prezi, but with a clunkier feel and look.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint can import graphics in the scalable SVG format popular on the web-and not yet supported by Keynote or Apple's other office apps. Office apps may also import-with just a few clicks-3D models from the Microsoft-created Remix 3D community website.

A new Insert an Icon item appears a menu with around five-hundred well-designed icons that you can insert in any Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document. They're all black-and-white by default, however, you can change the color from a pop-up menu. Word's elegant powerful equation editor now supports LaTeX syntax, with some variations from the standard syntax-and Microsoft has beefed up Office's online assist with complete information on equation syntax and far else, mostly eliminating the frustrations in earlier versions when you clicked on an aid button simply to find out that help wasn't available.

The final word on Word

A well-hidden Speak feature in Office 2016 has blossomed into the improved Read Aloud tool offered by the Review ribbon in Word. It's also available from the brand new Learning Tools portion of the View ribbon. The Learning Tools menu includes options to displaying widely spaced text for simple reading as well as text with dots showing between syllables. For the former option, you are able to display either just the current line, or one or two lines above and below it, with the rest from the text almost invisible. Alternatively, you can change the background color for legibility or invert the colors (white text on a black background).

Microsoft Word has always outclassed almost every other word-processor in its range of view options-including draft, web, and distraction-free reading modes-and the training Tools build on this strong foundation. On the Mac, oddly, the training Tools require an Office 365 subscription, and aren't part of the standalone Office 2019 product, because they are on Windows. Exactly the same limitation pertains to the freeform Zoom presentation feature in PowerPoint.

Math-tastic

Office has had drawing tools provided I'm able to remember, but the 2019 version adds ink features that convert mouse- or pencil-drawn scrawls into geometric shapes like circles or triangles, or that convert hand-written formulas into typographic math. This selection works even with my clumsy tries to write equations having a trackball, but it is mostly created for use with a pencil on a tablet, especially a Microsoft Surface model.

Office 2019 enhances digital-pencil support, with pressure- and tilt-sensitivity and also the ability to move text by dragging it with a pencil.

Cross-Platform Excellence

Office 2019 may be the smoothest, slickest, and most powerful set of office applications ever written, though that doesn't mean it is the perfect for the way you work. On the plus side, the Office file formats are universal. Should you share a thing document or Excel worksheet, anyone can open it on any modern computer, and also on any modern mobile device with the free Office mobile apps installed.

If you use every other office suite-like Apple's iWork apps, the open-source LibreOffice, or Corel WordPerfect Office-you'll probably have to export your files in Office formats before sharing all of them with other people. The same thing pertains to online suites like Google Docs. You can share online access to some Google Docs documents by sending a sharing link to anyone, but when you need to share the document itself as a file, you will need to download it in Word or some other standard format.

Office Strengths

Also on Office's plus side are features and talents that little else can match. Excel handles larger and much more complex spreadsheets than any rival. PowerPoint is the only Windows-based presentation app that comes close to matching Apple's Keynote in dazzling transitions along with other effects. Word's professional-level features make it simple to limit the find-and-replace feature so that it only finds text formatted with specific fonts or spacing. Word also offers a strong group of well-integrated drawing tools, so the Windows crowd can use advanced graphics features such as the ones that Apple offers using its Pages word-processor for macOS and iOS.

Office Drawbacks

As all long-term users know, Office has some negative aspects. For example, if you like to select how to format your documents (like the headings and indentations), rather than letting Word decide, you have to turn off twelve options hidden in Word's auto-correct feature. Microsoft Word stores many default settings in the Normal.dotm template. While advanced users can back up this file and make different versions of it for various purposes, Microsoft doesn't help you figure out where this file is in your hard disk. (It's in a hidden folder inside your user folder named AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates.)

I am not the only real user that has been annoyed by Word's Master Document feature, which lets you embed separate subdocuments inside a container document, while letting you edit the subdocuments separate files. This selection has a bad history of leaving the contents of subdocuments inside a master document instead of keeping them separate. Word 2019 seems to be more reliable with master documents than older versions, but, being burned in the past, I am not yet prepared to trust this selection when focusing on a multi-chapter book.

One Note About Onenote

One app you won't see in the Windows version of Office 2019 is a latest version of Onenote 2016. Rather than updating the desktop form of Onenote, Office 2019 now uses the modern Microsoft Store form of Onenote which comes preinstalled on Windows 10. Onenote for Windows 10 automatically opens Onenote 2016 notebooks stored in the cloud, however, you still Onenote 2016 if you are using notebooks stored on a local PC. Onenote 2016 remains a totally free download from Microsoft. All this applies to Windows only. Onenote on the Mac hasn't changed aside from its regular monthly minor updates.

Another new development which will matter into it departments: Office 2019 installs itself through the efficient click-to-run technology familiar from Office 365, not the standard full-scale .MSI installer used by most commercial software, including earlier versions of Office.

Office 2019 vs. Office 365

If, like most Windows users, you've put your main working life into Office, should you buy or rent-buy Office 2019 or sign up for Office 365? Corporate and government offices that frown on sharing data on Microsoft's servers will decide to buy. All students and teachers could possibly get Office 2019 either free or an inexpensive price (typically $14.99) through site licenses negotiated by schools and colleges. However, subscription-based Office 365 is the obvious option for offices which use Microsoft's ecosystem for collaboration and sharing and anybody who would rather keep documents in the cloud. Office 365 has an optional automatic continuous-save feature for documents stored in the cloud that's not obtainable in Office 2019 even if you save to Microsoft OneDrive. And, of course, Microsoft 365 enables you to edit and collaborate in your cloud-based documents from the desktop machine, mobile phone, or internet browser.

If, much like me, you customize your Office apps by creating macros to perform complex, repetitive tasks, you might encounter gotchas such as the one that tripped up my Office 365 form of Word a few months ago. I favor to make use of the keyboard-friendly spell-check dialog from older versions of Word instead of the more awkward proofing panel in recent versions. As described on many web postings relating to this subject, Microsoft made it possible to make use of the old dialog by default by writing a macro and attaching it to the same key that normally opens the brand new proofing pane.

For some months last year, however, a badly designed Office 365 update broke that macro making it impossible for many users to access the old-style dialog. No one outside Microsoft ever figured out why some users weren't affected. A few months later, Microsoft finally seems to have fixed the issue in Office 365. But users with Office 2016 never encountered the problem at all, because Office 2016 (like Office 2019) does not get the kind of regular update that may break existing features.

This problem made me change to "perpetual" Office 2016, and now Office 2019, for that Windows machines I use for mission-critical work. Around the Mac, I still use Office 365 because Office 2019 for that Mac lacks features included in the subscription-based product, though I do not see any valid reason for that different feature takes hold Mac and Windows Office 2019.

Office Alternatives

Finally, the use of Office whatsoever, when Google Docs is free for everybody on all platforms, LibreOffice is free of charge for those desktop users, and Apple's gorgeous iWorks apps (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) have the freedom on the Mac and iOS? For those its minor faults, Office still towers over all alternatives.

Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides may be the first choice for anyone who prefers free software and effortless sharing, as well as for casual users that do not want to keep their documents in files on a pc.

LibreOffice is feature-rich, open-source, and free, and opens legacy documents in additional formats than other things, but after decades of development, will still be clumsy-looking and too prone to crashing to inspire confidence.

Apple's iWork apps (which are not sold like a combined suite) look dazzling and have unique features like Numbers' tables that may be moved around with an empty canvas, unlike a conventional worksheet that utilizes merely a single grid. But iWork has desktop apps only on Macs, and can make you export documents if you want to share them outside Apple's ecosystem.

Corel WordPerfect, available only for Windows, offers unparalleled precise treatments for document formatting and it is easier than Office for specialized purposes like clearing up documents created by OCR software, but WordPerfect will be a distinct segment product.

Still the Champion

You might complain relating to this or that corner of Microsoft Office, but it's still probably the most comfortable, familiar, powerful, and reliable set of productivity apps on this or other planet. If you're pleased with Office 365, you don't need Office 2019. If you are pleased with Office 2016, you simply need Office 2019 if you want its additional features. One way or another, you probably want Office on your hard drive, and though the 2019 version isn't a truly essential upgrade, measuring only since the last version has organized very well. In either case, Office 2019 is the best office suite you can buy, and it remains an Editors' Choice.