Office 365 VS. Microsoft Office 2021 (2024)

Loreal,

The best answer I can give is "not a ton." Office 2016 served as the code base of everything that's come after. We are now reaching a point in time where Microsoft 365 editions of the Office Suite programs are, slowly, diverging from being exact clones of the earlier standalone versions.

Office 2016 and 2019 go out of support in 2025, and Office 2021 will go out of support in 2026.

If you have access to both M365 and Office 2021, it makes more sense to stick with the M365 versions of the Office Suite programs. All screen reader makers have to keep up with M365, and will, because it will soon enough be the only thing that Microsoft supports.
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Brian· ♂ · 🏳️‍🌈-Virginia, USA-Windows 11 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 22H2, Build 22621; M365 Family;Android 13 (MIUI 14)

To think is to differ.

~ Clarence Darrow

Andy Baracco

365 allows you access from multiple devices while 2021 can only reside on one device.

Andy

On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 11:26 PM, Andy Baracco wrote:

365 allows you access from multiple devices while 2021 can only reside on one device.

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It also gets you access to 1 TB cloud storage, which none of the standalone versions of Office do.

That being said, I interpreted the original question as being more focused on whether there are differences in how the individual programs in the suite work or you as the end user work with them.

M365 is an ecosystem inside the Windows ecosystem. It's worlds different from "just plain Office" in a great many ways when the big picture is taken into account.
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Brian· ♂ · 🏳️‍🌈-Virginia, USA-Windows 11 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 22H2, Build 22621; M365 Family;Android 13 (MIUI 14)

To think is to differ.

~ Clarence Darrow

On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 11:12 AM, Loreal Lavigna wrote:

I wasn’t sure about whether the stand-alone versions could be run on multiple devices, but now that I know they cannot, it makes me want to stick with 365 all the more.

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Just to be clear, it is possible to buy multi-seat licenses for standalone versions of Office, so you can have it on multiple devices. But, it was never designed like M365 is to have the ecosystem spread across multiple devices with diverse operating systems.

When you add in the fact that any M365 license of any type allows the holder to install on up to 5 devices per seat, it's a huge bargain. For home users that have friends who might want to go in on M365 Family, at $99 per year, that has 6 seats associated with it, and 1 TB of cloud storage per seat, you cannot come close to getting any standalone version of office cheaper than that. And since each of those 6 seats can install on up to 5 devices . . .

$16.50 per year, per person, on M365 Family if you actually use all 6 seats among "friends and family" is just impossible to beat for value. And even a Business Standard subscription, at $12.50/month per seat, is a bargain too given the additional features like OneDrive Professional and SharePoint storage and a Microsoft Tenant that come with it.

Standalone versions of Office, sourced from Microsoft, have never been cheap, and it takes a number of years on the subscriptions to hit the amount you pay for each individual license for standalone. And given that all standalone versions are now on loudly ticking clocks for being in support . . .
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Brian· ♂ · 🏳️‍🌈-Virginia, USA-Windows 11 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 22H2, Build 22621; M365 Family;Android 13 (MIUI 14)

To think is to differ.

~ Clarence Darrow

All of the M365 programs can behave just as their standalone counterparts do. As Bill has noted, you may need to tweak settings away from defaults, as the default under Windows itself, not just M365, is to use OneDrive storage for Documents, Music, Pictures, and Desktop. But even when using OneDrive, you have the option to set certain files and/or folders to always keep local copies so that they are available when internet service is interrupted, and get synced back to their OneDrive counterparts in the cloud when it comes back. Also, when you fetch a file from OneDrive that is "cloud only" it doesn't go back, instantly, to cloud only status the moment you finish with it. A local copy is maintained because it's common practice to keep working on something "for a while" after it's fetched, and by while I mean days after. Those files go back to cloud only when a sufficient period of time has surpassed since they've last been accessed that indicates that they're no longer actively being used.

As to privacy and concerns about the cloud, that ship has sailed, and long ago. Cloud storage is used by government agencies, hospitals and other organizations subject to HIPAA, and all sorts of very privacy-concerned entities. Absolutely nothing is unhackable, but the security in place in professional data centers far exceeds what any one of us have on our own personal computers. The reason that most of us don't get hacked isn't because we have a fortress surrounding our PCs, but because we're not juicy targets. There is very little hacking these days that's done purely for amusem*nt. Almost all of it is for monetary gain, and what most people as individuals have on their PCs isn't worth diddly-squat if a big payout is what's being sought, and that is what's being sought.

And with ransomware being one of the most popular methods of extracting money from everyone from individuals to government entities these days, storage on the cloud is much safer. As of this moment, ransomware cannot "jump the canyon" that exists between a local machine and the cloud storage it uses. That will almost certainly eventually change, as computer security has always been a cat and mouse game where what can't be done now, will be done at some point in the future. But until that point comes . . .

Also, given what my professional experience has shown me about the probability of home users actually backing up the data they have on their computer's drive, and it's low, cloud storage is a much safer option in terms of data preservation. With the rise of SSDs, which are great so long as they're working, that fail usually without warning, and always such that any data recovery is far more expensive and far less certain than from platter drives gone bad, cloud storage is even more attractive.

The first time you get a new computer after having started to use OneDrive with an M365 subscription (or having purchased space without that, but the subscription is actually cheaper) and can just log in to that new machine associating the same Microsoft Account to your Windows login that you had with your other machine, and have every blessed bit of your data "automagically" just reappear and be there, it seems like a small miracle. (It also takes away one of the parts of the IT business that has been "bread and butter" for years, and that's data transfer between computers. It's just not necessary when user data is in the cloud and not locally stored.)
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Brian· ♂ · 🏳️‍🌈-Virginia, USA-Windows 11 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 22H2, Build 22621; M365 Family;Android 13 (MIUI 14)

To think is to differ.

~ Clarence Darrow