While Excel 2019 licenses are available for purchase, Microsoft strongly recommends organizations and individual users to use the subscription option. Organizations are able to choose their update channel on the subscription model to occur monthly or semi-annually. Subscription-based Office 365 is designed to regularly release updates which means that changes are gradual and users have time to get used to the changes. Understandably this has caused users to become impatient when they find out about new features included in a newer model. The user will not receive any updates until the next version of the software is released.

A perpetual license has always been made available by Microsoft for outright purchase and outright ownership. The Difference Between an Excel Perpetual and a Subscription-Based LicenseĮxcel 365 is the subscription-based version of Excel and Excel 2019 is the perpetual, stand-alone, bought-outright version. Right now, there is not much difference between Excel 365 and the new 2019 version in terms of functionality, rather it just involves a different licensing agreement.

Microsoft has been moving toward a subscription-based model in recent years in order to make incremental changes rather than big changes to file types that posed all sorts of difficulties for Excel users.

Technically Excel 2019 is not yet available, however, many of the new features are accessible to subscribers to the Office 365 version.

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