What you need to know
- Microsoft Office 2024 is now available for consumers and small businesses.
- Office 2024 gets you access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook on Mac and PC.
- You can purchase Office 2024 for a one-time payment of $149.99 or $249.99, depending on which apps you'd like to use.
Microsoft Office 2024 is now available for consumers and small businesses. The suite provides access to the core Office apps without requiring a subscription. There are two editions of Office 2024. For $149.99, you can purchase Office Home 2024, which comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for one PC or Mac. Office Home & Business $249.99 comes with the same apps as the Home edition but also includes Outlook and the rights to use apps for commercial purposes. You can purchase either edition of Office 2024 through Microsoft's website.
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What's new in Office 2024?
Office 2024 has a new look that uses Fluent Design principles. That means the Office apps look more at home on Windows 11. It also includes several features that improve accessibility across the Office apps.
Transferring photos from a phone to a computer is now easier with Office 2024, since you can now use your Android device to insert pictures into Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint now support OpenDocument Format 1.4 in Office 2024. Word and PowerPoint also gained the ability to like comments.
Dynamic charts with dynamic arrays and text and array functions within Excel expand the capabilities of the app. Excel also gained a new IMAGE function that lets you add pictures to a workbook by pulling images from the web. When navigating a workbook, you should see better performance since both speed and stability are better in Excel 2024 than the previous version of Excel.
Cameo support arrives in PowerPoint with Office 2024, allowing you to insert a live camera feed into a PowerPoint slide. PowerPoint also gained support for embedding Microsoft Stream videos and creating a video in Recording Studio.
Starting with Office 2024, Word will open all the documents you had open if the app closes unexpectedly, saving you from losing work.
Microsoft outlines all the changes in Office 2024 in a support document, including everything new in Outlook and Access.
Microsoft Office vs. Microsoft 365
Microsoft Office 2024 and Microsoft 365 have some overlap regarding which services and apps they provide access to, but they're fundamentally different. Microsoft Office 2024 and earlier versions of Office get you locked-in-time versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook. You pay a flat fee and then have access to those apps going forward. In contrast, Microsoft 365 requires a subscription but gets you regular app updates, so you're always on the latest versions of your apps.
Microsoft 365 also lets you use more Microsoft apps and services, such as OneDrive, Microsoft Defender, and Microsoft Editor.
The long-in-short is that Microsoft 365 gets you more apps, services, and updates, but it requires a subscription. If you only need the core Office apps and don't want to pay monthly or annually, Microsoft Office 2024 may be a better option.
If you are looking into Microsoft 365, make sure to check out our guide on the best Microsoft 365 deals, which can save you quite a bit of money on Microsoft's productivity suite.
