Microsoft Office doesn't have a lot of an intro, and Office 2019 may be the latest as well as form of the suite for business users. Importantly, it's yours for a one-off payment, as opposed to the regular subscription fees required for Office 365.

Although many users will be switching to Office 365, if you want Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook on a single computer and can live without various cloud-sharing services, then Office 2019 continues to be worth a glance. This is what you get and just how it works.

Key features and apps

Get hold of Microsoft Office 2019 plus you've got the strongest office applications at your fingertips: Word, Excel and PowerPoint offer a level of depth and control that you don't get from the likes of Google Docs or free office alternatives.

We've laid out the important thing aspects of Office 2019 below - click on on any of the sections to see our detailed reviews, which outline all the features and possibilities in these products.

Word - Able to ace any kind of word processing job, Word is every bit comfortable drafting letters, wrangling huge essays, or whipping up quick newsletters. Despite its insightful features and tools, the app manages to still seem accessible and intuitive, because of that Ribbon interface. Despite 3 decades, this remains the word processor to beat.

Excel - Full of functions, no other spreadsheet program really compares to Succeed in relation to advanced capabilities. Additional features happen to be thin on the floor recently, but that is only since it already has everything you are going to need - from crunching the numbers around the annual budget to organizing the tea rota.

PowerPoint - The all-powerful presentation tool gets some new tricks in Office 2019, including support for advancing slides with Bluetooth pens, a brand new zoom interface for jumping between slides, and a cool morph transition. May possibly not be as lean as a number of its newer rivals (like Google Slides) but it is hard to beat in terms of overall capabilities.

Outlook - The one email, calendar, contacts and tasks application to rule all of them, Outlook is constantly on the impress, though like Excel it hasn't been blessed with many upgrades recently. Still, it's certain to perform a fine job of managing your emails across multiple accounts, and now includes a new Focused inbox for your most important messages only.

Access - Microsoft's venerable database application continues to be open to you whenever you pick up an Office 2019 purchase, should you have an excuse for it, and also the app remains as solid and dependable as ever. New in this version are a few improved chart types, support for a number of new data types, and accessibility upgrades as well, but nothing major.

Note that Microsoft hasn't included Onenote in the Office 2019 package, if you can choose to set up the 2016 version if you wish to. Instead, Microsoft is pushing users for the Windows 10 Onenote app (universally available to everyone), that ought to be enough to deal with all your note-taking needs.

Office 2019 vs Office 2016

Office 2019 doesn't have a insightful new features in contrast to its predecessor, or anything that's necessarily going to change the game in terms of your productivity, however it does incorporate a few upgrades that are worth highlighting.

Once we mentioned previously, Outlook's new Focused inbox tries to find out the emails that are most important to you, and pushes the rest into the background (if you require a Microsoft Exchange account to use it). There's also support to have your messages read out loud, and time zone support within the calendar component.

In Word, you've got improved translation, text-to-speech, and text spacing options, in addition to better support for stylus pens and digital scribbles in your documents. Also new is a Focus mode that strips away the nearby distractions when you really need to simply read through something on-screen (such as the reading mode in many browsers).

Over in Excel, you have similar improvements to the inking capabilities, as well as a smattering of recent functions and new chart types to get your teeth into. You can also now drop 3D models into your spreadsheets and examine them from all angles. Many other tweaks and enhancements to features like PivotTables are included too.

Also as stated before, PowerPoint gets an impressive new Morph transition, and support for digital inking (just like Word and Excel). The 3D model support we've already referred to is roofed in PowerPoint too, and you may now export a slideshow like a 4K video, in the event you discover that a better option for sharing your work with other people.

Office 2019 vs Office 365

There's no doubt about it, Microsoft would prefer to take your money every month rather than just a one-off payment without any follow-up. With that in mind, it's keeping a number of features as Office 365 exclusives, which means you should be aware of what you are missing out on prior to you making a choice which Office version to choose.

Office 2019 won't receive any feature improvements with time, aside from security fixes and bug-squashing updates. Office 365, meanwhile, gets additional features regularly - all of the new stuff in Office 2019 is already open to Office 365 users. To get better features in Office 2019, you will need to upgrade to another one-off Office purchase, if Microsoft decides to release a different one.

Another key feature exclusive to Office 365 is OneDrive - which means cloud storage for all your users, simple syncing across multiple machines, and real-time collaboration on documents. There are many benefits to OneDrive if you are working as a team, including basic online versions from the Office apps.

You will get some of these OneDrive features by using the free, consumer version of OneDrive open to everyone - but that needs combining business and personal accounts, and also you only get 15GB of storage for free. As cloud-based computing gets to be more important, OneDrive integration is among the key reasons why you might like to jump to Office 365.

Office 2019 will set you back £249.99/$249.99 to be used on one PC. Office 365 Business starts at £7.90 + VAT per user per month by having an annual payment ($8.25 in america), or £9.50 + VAT per user monthly if you're paying month-to-month ($10 in the US). Those Office 365 fees cover application installations across five computers, too.

Office 2019: competition and verdict

In terms of features and capabilities, the likes of Word, Excel and PowerPoint are still hard to touch. However, the cloud-based features and regular updates of Office 365 are well worth considering for the business needs, even if you do have to spend money to Microsoft each month.

If you are planning to pay for a monthly fee, G Suite is another strong contender for your cash. Its apps aren't quite as powerful as Microsoft's, but they're slick and fast, and built with the net in mind. They might suit you best if you want speed and simplicity rather than a long list of features that you're never going to use.

It truly all comes down to your needs of your business. If you focus on just one computer, with not much requirement for sharing and collaborating on documents, then Office 2019 remains unequalled - you may make your single payment, get the software installed, and then you're looking for a long time.