Students and teachers are eligible for Office 365 Education, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and now Microsoft Teams, plus additional classroom tools. All you need to get started is a valid school email address.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Office 2019 for Windows and Mac. Office 2019 is the next on-premises version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Project, Visio, Access, and Publisher.

Get more with Office 365 ProPlus

Create professional diagrams with ready-made templates and 250,000 shapes in the Visio content ecosystem that meet industry standards like BPMN 2.0, UML 2.5, and IEEE Included Get started easily, customize and complete diagrams faster, and draw or annotate using pen, finger, or ink. If you are purchasing fewer than five licenses: Visio Online Plan 2 may be purchased directly through Office365.com. Visio Professional 2016 and Visio Standard 2016 may be purchased through resellers and retailers, such as the Microsoft Store. Microsoft Visio Plan 2, available as a subscription, includes the same capabilities as Visio Professional 2016. Microsoft excel mac adding characters to filename pdf. In addition, such cloud-only features as Data Visualizer, Database Reverse Engineering, Improved Support for the AutoCAD drawings have been recently introduced. Visio (professional edition) is great program but way to expensive considering other cross-platform and web-based offerings. Microsoft should consider making Visio Pro a $75 add-on (with the desktop application) to any Office 365 subscription. Although Microsoft has never released Visio for Mac, the good news is there are some fantastic alternatives that do everything Visio can – and more! In fact in some cases, we think the software featured here are even better than Microsoft’s product when it comes to visual communication and collaboration.

Office 365 ProPlus is the most productive and most secure Office experience for enterprises.

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Office 365 ProPlus, the cloud-connected version of Office, delivers the most productive and most secure Office experience—with the lowest total cost of ownership for deployment and management. However, for customers who aren’t ready for the cloud, Office 2019 provides new features and updates to the on-premises apps for both users and IT professionals. Like Windows Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) releases, Office 2019 provides a set of valuable enhancements for customers who can’t be cloud-connected or receive regular updates.

The new enhancements in Office 2019 are a subset of a long list of features that have been added to Office 365 ProPlus over the last three years. Office 2019 is a one-time release and won’t receive future feature updates. However, we’ll continue to add new features to Office 365 ProPlus monthly, including innovations in collaboration, artificial intelligence (AI), security, and more.

Office 2019 delivers features across apps to help users create amazing content in less time. In PowerPoint 2019, you can create cinematic presentations with new features like Morph and Zoom. And improved inking features across the apps in Windows—like the roaming pencil case, pressure sensitivity, and tilt effects—allow you to naturally create documents.

Excel 2019 adds powerful new data analysis features, including new formulas and charts and enhancements to PowerPivot.

Purchase Microsoft Visio For Mac Free

Word 2019 and Outlook 2019 help you focus on what matters most. Learning Tools, like Read Aloud and Text Spacing, make it easier to engage with your content. Focus Mode blocks out distractions and puts your content front and center. And Focused Inbox moves less important emails out of the way—so you can get straight to taking care of business. For a longer list of the new features in Office 2019, see our FAQs.

Office 2019 also includes new IT value for enhanced security and streamlined administration. We introduced Click-to-Run (C2R), a modern deployment technology, in Office 2013, and it’s now used to deploy and update Office across hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. With Office 2019, we’re moving the on-premises versions of Office to C2R to reduce costs and improve security. The advantages of C2R include predictable monthly security updates, up-to-date apps on installation, reduced network consumption through Windows 10 download optimization technology, and an easy upgrade path to Office 365 ProPlus. C2R offers the same enterprise-focused management capabilities as Microsoft Installer (MSI) based products and will also support an in-place upgrade when you move to Office 2019 from older MSI-based products. To learn more, refer to the Office 2019 Click-to-Run FAQ.

The 2019 release of Office products also includes updates to our servers, and in the coming weeks, we will release Exchange Server 2019, Skype for Business Server 2019, SharePoint Server 2019, and Project Server 2019.

Office 2019 is a valuable update for customers who aren’t yet ready for the cloud. And each time we release a new on-premises version of Office, customers ask us if this will be our last. We’re pleased to confirm that we’re committed to another on-premises release in the future. While the cloud offers real benefits in productivity, security, and total cost of ownership, we recognize that each customer is at a different point in their adoption of cloud services. We see the on-premises version of Office as an important part of our commitment to give customers the flexibility they need to move to the cloud at their own pace.

Availability

  • Commercial volume-licensed (trusted) customers can access Office 2019 starting today.
  • Office 2019 is now available for consumer and commercial customers. For consumer customers in China, India, and Japan, Office 2019 suites will be available in the next few months.
  • Certain features are only available in the Mac or Windows versions of Office 2019. For details, see the FAQ.

Mac users aren’t at all shy about making their requests for applications known:

Microsoft Visio For Mac

How about Visio for Mac?

When will IE return to Mac?

Visio For Mac Download

Will we ever see a Microsoft Project for Mac?

Where can I get Access for Mac?

When will (insert name of hot new game here) be available for Mac?

Most of these requests are for well-known Microsoft applications on Windows, and Mac users want them. Let me address a few of these in some detail.

Microsoft Visio

It’s unwise to say “never” with regard to future development efforts by a company as large as Microsoft, so I will predict this about Visio for Mac: it’s very, very unlikely to ever happen.

I, and many others, believe the development costs to produce a Mac Visio that would faithfully render any existing Visio drawing (and have almost all the functionality of Visio for Windows) would never be recouped by Microsoft.

For any Mac software company, a software product that brought in $50 million per year would be viewed as a fantastic success. But in the rarified world of the Microsoft Office team, such a product would be considered a dismal failure.

For any Mac software company, a software product that brought in $50 million per year would be viewed as a fantastic success. But in the rarified world of the Microsoft Office team, such a product would be considered a dismal failure.

Microsoft Access

Exactly the same as Visio: very, very unlikely to ever happen, and for exactly the same reason.

Internet Explorer

Never going to happen.

There was a version of IE for Mac about 15 years ago. Microsoft ceased development of IE for Mac in July 2003. Given that there is no new development for IE for Windows (because of the release of Microsoft Edge in 2015), there is no chance at all for a future release of IE for Mac.

Any Hot New Game by Microsoft

Never going to happen.

The graphics foundations on Mac and Windows diverge sufficiently that porting any hot new Windows game over to the Mac is a major undertaking. It would be unlikely to recoup development costs, for the same reasons as the Office applications. You can read more details about DirectX and OpenGL.

What’s a Mac User to Do?

There are a couple of options for a Mac user:

  • Use a viewer application. In some cases, a viewer application that faithfully renders a document that you could not otherwise open will suffice. In the case of Visio, Microsoft has released a Visio Viewer for iOS, as shown in Figure 1.
  • Use a competing application. Search for “Visio for Mac” on Google, and many of the results will be for third-party applications for Mac that open Visio drawings and provide much of the same functionality.
  • Run the real Windows application on your Mac. If you need the real Visio with all its functionality, then use Parallels Desktop® for Mac to run Windows 10 on your Mac and purchase Visio from Microsoft. You lose no functionality or visual fidelity, since you are running the real Visio in the environment it expects: Windows 10.

(Already own Visio? No problem. Just use the Migration feature in Parallels Desktop to move everything on your PC—including Visio—into a virtual machine on your Mac.)

Figure 2 shows Visio running on my MacBook Pro®.

Figure 2_Visio 2016 running in Windows10 on a Mac with Parallels Desktop

Figures 3 and 4 show Access, and Figure 5 shows IE—all running on my MacBook Pro.

Microsoft

Figure 3_Access 2016 in Windows 10 running on a Mac with Parallels Desktop

Figure 4_Access 2016 in Windows 10 running on a Mac with Parallels Desktop

Figure 5_IE in Windows10 running on a Mac with Parallels Desktop

Is There Visio For Mac

While you may not be able to get the Mac applications you desire, you can get the Windows versions and run them right alongside your Mac applications.

As the product manager for Parallels Desktop, you might consider my opinions to be a bit biased. (They aren’t, but you might think that.) So, here is a quote from a Network World review (emphasis mine):

“I’ve been a Mac user for many years, and like with most Mac users, there are occasions when I have core business apps that require me to run Internet Explorer for a browser, or run Visual Studio for app development work, or even run Microsoft Project and Visio that just aren’t available on a Mac. And while Apple provides BootCamp where I can switch between booting from a Mac to booting as a Windows system, that means I have to constantly reboot my system to switch between operating platforms. So I’ve been a happy user of Parallels for years where I can run Windows and Mac applications side by side at the same time.” –Rand Morimoto, Network World

Try Parallels Desktop for free for 14 days!