

If your organization opted not to upgrade its volume license from Office 2019 to Office 2021, the software continues to work and it will receive security updates for another couple of years, but new features stop. There's no upgrade path.īut the literal difference in features between Office 2019 (v16.52) and Office 2021 (v16.53) is just one month's worth of updates and features. If you have the "Office 2019 product" but want the new features that are part of the "Office 2021 product", you'll have to buy the "Office 2021 product". The difference is the "Office 2019 product" won't include features of the "Office 2021 product". "Office 2019" and "Office 2021" both relate to Volume License customers. One of the important features for Office 365 subscribers is they can take advantage of online services Microsoft integrates with their products like language translation, creating rich PDFs, etc.

Releasing updates monthly allows Microsoft to show its "Office 365" subscribers some new value each month.

It just means the customer is subscribing to Microsoft's monthly service to get the software. "Office 365" is still the exact same software as the "16.xx" software.

16.9 refers to January 2018 when Microsoft first publicly used that version. The "xx" is just a sequential number and you can associate that with a specific month/year. It's been 16.xx.0 for the past several years and that "16" isn't going to change any time in the near future. Those are three different ways of referring to the same software, but each means something specific.įirst, every month, Microsoft releases an update with a version number like "16.xx". The software bits you download regardless of whether you're downloading "version 16.xx" or "Office 365" or "Office 20xx" are the exact same.
