When you start an Office app that's not activated, you'll be prompted to sign in to Office. Be sure to sign in using the Microsoft account, or work or school account, that you used to buy or subscribe to Office.
Select your version of Office below to learn how to activate Office. Activate Office 365, 2019, 2016, and 2013
Note: If Office came pre-installed on your new device, see Activate Office that's pre-installed on a new Windows 10 device.
If the Activation wizard appears, Office needs your help to activate. Follow the prompts in the wizard to activate Office.
Activate Office that's pre-installed on a new Windows 10 deviceIf this screen appears, Office is installed as an Office 365 Home trial You'll see this screen if you sign in to Office that was pre-installed on a new device but don't have an Office product associated with your account. To use Office on your new device, you can activate Office as a 1-month trial of Office 365 Home. You can also buy Office, add Office to an existing Office 365 subscription, or enter a product key from a new product key card. If you have an older copy of Office, you can install that instead. Activate an Office purchase or offer that's included on a new Windows 10 device
If this screen appears, Office is installed as a one-year subscription or one-time purchase
A digital Office product key is transmitted to your PC, so you won't need or receive a printed product key. You activate Office by selecting the Activate Office button. Be sure to activate Office as soon possible. The offer will expire 180 days after you activate Windows.
Activate Office HUP
If you bought Office Professional Plus, Visio Professional, or Project Professional through your employer's Microsoft HUP benefit, select I don't want to sign in or create an account (at the bottom of the screen) and enter your product key.
Activate a brand new Office product key
If you bought a new Office product key card, or you received a product key when you bought Office through an online store, go to Office.com/setup and follow the on-screen prompts. This is a one-time process that adds your new Office product to your Microsoft account. After you redeem your key, you can install Office
Microsoft Office 2019 Release DateActivate Office if you see a 'limit reached' errorIf you see this message, it means you need to deactivate or sign out of Office on another device before you can activate Office on this device. Troubleshoot activation errorsIf Office can't activate, it eventually becomes unlicensed and all editing features of Office are disabled. Office can become unlicensed for a number of reasons. For example, if your Office 365 subscription expires, you must renew your subscription to restore all features of Office. If Office was pre-installed on your new PC, you must start an Office 365 Home trial or buy Office to continue using Office.
You may have noticed that Microsoft began rolling out a new version of Microsoft Office early this week. That means that there are now three versions of Microsoft Office out in the wild—Office 2016, Office 365, and the brand-new Office 2019.
If you’re curious about this new version of Microsoft Office, we’ve put together this guide to answer the biggest questions about Office 2019, such as how it differs from Office 2016 and Office 365, what features are (and aren’t) included, and when you can actually use it.
Advertisement
What is Office 2019?
Microsoft Office 2019 is a standalone, local (not cloud-based, like Office 365) version of the Microsoft Office software suite. It is a “perpetual” release, which is just a fancy way of saying you buy the software once and own it forever, rather than having to pay an annual subscription fee to access it. That said, you only get a license to use it on a single PC, whereas a subscription to Office 365 lets you use it on a PC, a tablet, and a smartphone.
Advertisement
This new release updates and replaces the 2016 versions of Word, Excel, etc. and includes many of the new features that have been rolled out to Office 365 users over the past three years. We’ll get to those in a bit.
The Essential Windows Apps for 2018
There are so many Windows apps out there, that picking a list of the very best, most must-install…
Read more Read
Advertisement
When is Office 2019 available, and how much will it cost?
Office 2019 is on sale now, but only for commercial-level customers. Availability will be rolling out regular ol’ customers like you and me in the coming weeks. That also means we don’t yet know what the price point is for individual users, but Microsoft will likely have that info soon. Expect to potentially pay a bit more than what you’d shell out for Office 2016 (currently $150 for the “Home and Student” version), as Microsoft already boosted the price of the commercial version ten percent to account for its “significant value added to the product over time.”
Advertisement
What are the system requirements for Office 2019?
Here’s a big change. On PCs, you’ll need Windows 10 for Office 2019; Microsoft will not support any versions of Windows 7 or 8. As always, Microsoft will make 32 and 64-bit versions of Office 2019 available.
Advertisement
For Mac, Microsoft will support the three most recent versions of macOS, currently macOS Sierra (10.12), High Sierra (10.13), and Mojave (10.14). As Microsoft notes:
“When a new version of macOS is released, Office 2019 for Mac’s Operating System requirement becomes the then-current three most recent versions at that time: the new version of macOS and the previous two versions. For example, at the time macOS 10.14 is generally available from Apple, Office for Mac will support macOS 10.12, 10.13, and 10.14.”
Advertisement
What new features can you expect?
Here’s a quick rundown of the important updates Office 2016 users will see if they upgrade to Office 2019.
Advertisement
Microsoft Word
Advertisement
With Office 2019, Microsoft says it’s focused on helping you, well… focus better when writing in Word. To do so, Word 2019 will be getting the aptly named Focus mode, which darkens the screen and reduces the displayed UI elements.
Users will also have new “Learning Tools,” including new text-to-speech, text spacing, and translator features. Mac users will also now have customizable ribbons (aka drop-down menus) in their version of the Word interface.
Advertisement
Outlook
Like Word, Outlook is also getting a new focus mode, called the “Focused Inbox,” to help streamline workflow and email drafting. Users can now use “@” commands for tagging people in emails, and contact cards have been overhauled.
Advertisement
Also, PC users will now have travel and delivery cards, while Mac users get new email templates; a Send Later function for scheduling delivery times; and read receipts. Both platforms also get Office 365 Group integration.
PowerPoint
Advertisement
The changes for PowerPoint are all about enhanced media and visual element support in presentations. The notable additions here are support for 3D model display/manipulation and SVG files on slides; new morph transitions; the ability to export your presentation in 4K UHD video format, and you can now write by hand and move elements with your pencil while editing.
OneNote Kung fu panda free download.
OneNote is arguably the biggest change included in Office 2019. This is technically a new OneNote release entirely, one that can replace OneNote 2016 (though OneNote 2016 remains available and will be supported by Microsoft through 2025). This new version, dubbed OneNote for Windows 10, includes Ink-to-Text support, meaning your handwritten words will be turned into typed text, plus better syncing between connected devices.
Advertisement
Excel
Advertisement
Finally, Excel gets a host of new functions—like new formulas and chart options, and support for 2D maps and timelines—to better present and organize your data. PC users will also receive updates to Power Pivot, Power Query, and the ability to export to Power BI.
Better pencil support and other tweaks
Advertisement
In addition to these program-specific updates, there are also changes that apply to all Office 2019 software. The most important of these is Microsoft’s beefed-up support for digital pencils, like expanded “roaming pencil case” support, which lets users write by hand and move parts of documents with their pencil, as well as new support for pressure sensitivity and tilt recognition. Office 2019 also comes with some behind-the-scenes changes such as monthly security updates and a reduction to network bandwidth use.
Will Office 2019 replace Office 365?
No. In a post announcing the software release, Microsoft makes sure to point out that Office 2019 is a standalone package of its software geared primarily towards private users and businesses who do not have the necessary internet access required to use the cloud-based Office 365. Because of this, many of the features present in the Office 365 versions of these apps are not included in their Office 2019 counterparts, especially cloud-based and collaborative features.
Advertisement
Furthermore, Microsoft makes it clear that while Office 2019 will be receiving regular security fixes, it will not be getting expanded feature updates, while Office 365 users can still look forward to new and updated features through regular monthly updates just as they always have.
The bottom line here is that Office 2019 is not going to replace Office 365, and it really isn’t meant to. That said, regardless of the particular use case, Office 2019 still fills a crucial role and services a section of Microsoft’s customer base that may have felt a bit neglected since Office 365 took the spotlight.
Advertisement
$149.99
Microsoft recently released Office 2019, the latest version of its Windows and Mac office suite, with useful new features slotted almost seamlessly into the familiar interface. A distraction-free mode for Word, better pivot tables for Excel, and better graphics and support for digital pencils for PowerPoint are just a few of the many tweaks and improvements to the venerable Office. While these aren't huge upgrades to the suite, they could be big productivity boons to the right users.
Office 365 users will point 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 at least 2016 (when office 2016 was released), whereas Office 365 users have to pay each and every month. Both versions are excellent, of course, and we'll go into the pros and cons of each later in this review.
Pricing, Versions, and Compatibility
As always, Microsoft offers more versions of Office than anyone wants to keep track of. The Office 2019 versions that most people will care about are Office Home & Student 2019, at $149.99, which includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and is licensed for one Windows machine or one Mac only. Office Professional 2019 at $439.99 for 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 continue to work under Windows 7 until January 2020, when Microsoft stops supporting Windows 7 altogether. (Windows 8 support will stop in January 2023.) On the Mac, you can use the three most recent macOS versions, Sierra, High Sierra, and Mojave.
Subscribe or Buy?
One reason you may not have noticed Office 2019 is that Microsoft prefers to publicize its subscription-based office suite Office Home 365, and its business version, instead of pushing you to buy Office 2019. Many corporations, colleges, and government offices prefer what Microsoft calls 'perpetual' products like Office 2019 and its predecessor Office 2016, rather than shelling out 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 the same. That said, Office 365 subscription adds real-time collaboration features (including the excellent Microsoft Teams), high-powered mobile apps, access to cloud-based research and editing tools, and regular infusions of new features every few months.
In contrast, Office 2019 will stay the same—except for monthly security updates and occasional bug fixes—until you decide to upgrade it to a future version a few years from now. Unlike Office 365, Office 2019 doesn't require you to sign in with a Microsoft account unless you want to. Users concerned about privacy are better off ignoring the sign-in button in the title bar of their Office apps altogether. On the downside, Office 2019 doesn't include access to Office's high-powered mobile apps. I discuss additional reasons why some users may prefer 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 should look familiar to anyone who has used any version from Office 2007 onwards. Simply put, Word 2019 is an attractive, but not a compelling upgrade. If you're happy with Office 2016, think twice before spending hard-earned cash on the new version unless you want or need some of the new version's unique features. Word and Outlook, for example, get a new set of features—called 'Learning Tools'—that make it easy to focus on text. Spreadsheet app Excel gets new functions and charts, including a funnel style and 2D maps, plus enhanced pivot and query tools.
New Features
Presentation powerhouse PowerPoint gets a Morph transition that shows separate objects moving to new locations from one slide to the next—matching Apple's Magic Move feature in Keynote. PowerPoint also gets a Zoom feature that lets you jump to any slide or section in your presentation, without following the traditional linear order—somewhat like the fluid, non-linear presentations pioneered by Prezi, but with a clunkier look and feel.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint can import graphics in the scalable SVG format widely used on the web—and not yet supported by Keynote or Apple's other office apps. Office apps can also import—with only a few clicks—3D models from the Microsoft-created Remix 3D community website.
A new Insert an Icon item pops up 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, but you can change the color from a pop-up menu. Word's elegant powerful equation editor now supports LaTeX syntax, with a few variations from the standard syntax—and Microsoft has beefed up Office's online help with complete details of equation syntax and much else, mostly eliminating the frustrations in earlier versions when you clicked on a Help button only to be told that help wasn't available.
The Last Word on Word
A well-hidden Speak feature in Office 2016 has blossomed into the improved Read Aloud tool available from the Review ribbon in Word. It's also available from the new Learning Tools section of the View ribbon. The Learning Tools menu includes options to displaying widely spaced text for easy reading as well as text with dots showing between syllables. For the former option, you can display either just the current line, or one or two lines above and below it, with the rest of 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 every other word-processor in its range of view options—including draft, web, and distraction-free reading modes—and the Learning Tools build on this strong foundation. On a Mac, oddly, the Learning Tools require an Office 365 subscription, and aren't part of the standalone Office 2019 product, as they are on Windows. The same limitation applies to the freeform Zoom presentation feature in PowerPoint.
Math-tastic
Office has had drawing tools for as long as I can 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 feature works even with my clumsy attempts to write equations with a trackball, but it's mostly designed 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 the ability to move text by dragging it with a pencil.
Cross-Platform Excellence
Office 2019 is the smoothest, slickest, and most powerful set of office applications ever written, though that doesn't mean it's the best for the way you work. On the plus side, the Office file formats are universal. If you share a Word 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 any other office suite—like Apple's iWork apps, the open-source LibreOffice, or Corel WordPerfect Office—you'll almost certainly need to export your files in Office formats before sharing them with anyone else. The same thing applies to online suites like Google Docs. You can share online access to a Google Docs documents by sending a sharing link to anyone, but if you want to share the document itself as a file, you'll have to download it in Word or some other standard format.
Office Strengths
Also on Office's plus side are features and abilities that nothing else can match. Excel handles larger and 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 and other effects. Word's professional-level features make it easy to limit the find-and-replace feature so that it only finds text formatted with specific fonts or spacing. Word also offers a powerful set of well-integrated drawing tools, so the Windows crowd can use advanced graphics features like the ones that Apple offers with 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 prefer to choose how to format your documents (such as the headings and indentations), instead of letting Word decide, you have to turn off a dozen options hidden in Word's auto-correct feature. Microsoft Word stores many default settings in its Normal.dotm template. While advanced users can back up this file and create different versions of it for different purposes, Microsoft doesn't help you figure out where this file is on your hard drive. (It's in a hidden folder in your user folder named AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTemplates.)
I'm not the only user who has been frustrated by Word's Master Document feature, which lets you embed separate subdocuments in a container document, while letting you edit the subdocuments as separate files. This feature has a bad history of leaving the contents of subdocuments in a master document instead of keeping them separate. Word 2019 seems to be more reliable with master documents than older versions, but, having been burned in the past, I'm not yet ready to trust this feature when working on a multi-chapter book.
One Note About OneNote
One app you won't see in the Windows version of Office 2019 is a new version of OneNote 2016. Instead of updating the desktop version of OneNote, Office 2019 now uses the modern Microsoft Store version of OneNote that comes preinstalled on Windows 10. OneNote for Windows 10 automatically opens OneNote 2016 notebooks stored in the cloud, but you still need OneNote 2016 if you use notebooks stored on a local PC. OneNote 2016 continues to be a free download from Microsoft. All this applies to Windows only. OneNote on the Mac hasn't changed except for its regular monthly minor updates.
Another new development that will matter to IT departments: Office 2019 installs itself through the efficient click-to-run technology familiar from Office 365, not the traditional 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 much of your working life into Office, should you buy or rent—buy Office 2019 or subscribe to Office 365? Corporate and government offices that frown on sharing data on Microsoft's servers will choose to buy. Many students and teachers can get Office 2019 either free or at a low price (typically $14.99) through site licenses negotiated by schools and colleges. However, subscription-based Office 365 is the obvious choice for offices that use Microsoft's ecosystem for collaboration and sharing and anyone who prefers to keep documents in the cloud. Office 365 has an optional automatic continuous-save feature for documents stored in the cloud that isn't available in Office 2019 even when you save to Microsoft OneDrive. And, of course, Microsoft 365 lets you edit and collaborate on your cloud-based documents from a desktop machine, mobile device, or web browser.
If, like me, you customize your Office apps by creating macros to perform complex, repetitive tasks, you may encounter gotchas like the one that tripped up my Office 365 version of Word a few months ago. I prefer to use 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 about this subject, Microsoft made it possible to use the old dialog by default by writing a macro and attaching it to the same key that normally opens the new proofing pane.
For a few months last year, however, a badly designed Office 365 update broke that macro and made 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 problem in Office 365. But users with Office 2016 never encountered the problem at all, because Office 2016 (like Office 2019) doesn't get the kind of regular update that can break existing features.
That problem made me switch to 'perpetual' Office 2016, and now Office 2019, for the Windows machines I use for mission-critical work. On the Mac, I still use Office 365 because Office 2019 for the Mac lacks features built into the subscription-based product, though I don't see any good reason for the different feature sets in Mac and Windows Office 2019.
Office Alternatives
Finally, should you use Office at all, when Google Docs is free for everyone on all platforms, LibreOffice is free for all desktop users, and Apple's gorgeous iWorks apps (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) are free on the Mac and iOS? For all its minor faults, Office still towers over all alternatives.
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides is the first choice for anyone who prefers free software and effortless sharing, and for casual users who don't want to keep their documents in files on a desktop computer.
LibreOffice is feature-rich, open-source, and free, and opens legacy documents in more formats than anything else, but after decades of development, it's still clumsy-looking and far too prone to crashing to inspire confidence.
Apple's iWork apps (which are not sold as a combined suite) look dazzling and have unique features like Numbers' tables that can be moved around on an empty canvas, unlike a traditional worksheet that uses only a single grid. But iWork has desktop apps only on Macs, and forces you to export documents if you want to share them outside Apple's ecosystem.
Corel WordPerfect, available only for Windows, offers unparalleled precise control over document formatting and is more convenient than Office for specialized purposes like cleaning up documents created by OCR software, but WordPerfect will always be a niche product.
Still the Champion
You may complain about this or that corner of Microsoft Office, but it's still the most comfortable, familiar, powerful, and reliable set of productivity apps on this or any other planet. If you're happy with Office 365, you don't need Office 2019. If you're happy with Office 2016, you only need Office 2019 if you want its new features. One way or another, you probably want Office on your desktop, and though the 2019 version isn't an absolutely essential upgrade, that's only because the last version has held up so well. Either way, Office 2019 is the best office suite you can buy, and it remains an Editors' Choice.
Microsoft Office 2019
Bottom Line: Microsoft Office remains the most powerful and flexible office suite money can buy, and the locally installed software version trumps even Microsoft's own Office 365 when it comes to stability and its one-time purchase model.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.blog comments powered by Disqus
Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |