Windows 10 will stop getting new Office features in August of 2026
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I haven't needed new features since Office 2003, which was the best version of Office with the best interface. I still use it just FINE.
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As far as I can tell, SVG support was added in 2017 — that's a big plus for me. I have not come across any other new useful features.
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I have good things to say about WSL from the perspective of a Linux user: it does a decent job of letting me use Linux tools I like (mainly command line) on a Windows machine.
But to "trial different flavors of Linux" is not something it is well suited to. You can run Linux GUI apps in it, but it isn't informative as they might end up with weird window decorations or inconsistent file dialogs.
More importantly, running a full desktop environment is flaky and you have limited choices to try out -so getting the 'flavor' of launching and using various things within a desktop won't work so well.
As another poster suggested, something like Virtualbox would be a better fit for that experimentation. Many distributions enable you to install multiple desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon etc) concurrently so that you can just log in to a different one without a while setup process.
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The last 10 years? Probably not. I have machines with standalone installs of Office 16, and they're basically indistinguishable from the latest on 365.
The last big, actually useful feature (for me) that I can think of was in 2007, when they FINALLY allowed Excel to break the 65,563 row limit (at least for the XML file format).
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August 27th, 2026...
Microsoft: We're rolling out an update to Office that allows the user to disable Copilot permanently across their entire system, and automatically opt out of any data collection even when collaborating with someone who has Copilot enabled. Only on Windows 11!
Microsoft: We're rolling out an update to Office that allows the user to disable Copilot permanently across their entire system, and automatically opt out of any data collection even when collaborating with someone who has Copilot enabled. Only on Windows 11!
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About two years ago, they added an option to Excel to not destroy leading zeros or convert text strings to dates.
Not so much a new feature as addressing a longstanding bug.
But. Hey. Only took them three decades.
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I picked my battles with the hardcore Excel freaks when possible. Sometimes, what they need is far out of scope that another product will be better utilized than Excel. Sadly, you can't coax a 10yr old macro that makes thing work for their data until the next big update and say SOL. Security Compliance.
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Mildly offtopic: thanks to a bit of tinkering with Word's WordArt many years ago I have a really beautiful large tattoo on the left side of my ribcage. Thanks for making this possible Microsoft!
I've always liked Office, I own an oldschool disc/serial version and will be using it for as long as I'll be running Windows 10.
My Thinkpad was recently converted to Mint though and my PC is likely to follow suit sometime.
That said...unless MS fixes their (currently) evil ways ór I run into Apple money.
I've always liked Office, I own an oldschool disc/serial version and will be using it for as long as I'll be running Windows 10.
My Thinkpad was recently converted to Mint though and my PC is likely to follow suit sometime.
That said...unless MS fixes their (currently) evil ways ór I run into Apple money.
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Really the only feature that's been missing from Excel (besides some VBA/macro editor updates) is support for/built-in Gantt chart templates.
Some of the new formulas are nice, that's basically it except for Copilot junk AFAIK. For more details, see e.g., https://exceljet.net/new-excel-functions CONCAT, IFS, and XLOOKUP are the biggest ones for me.
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Notepad has had spellcheck for a couple of years now in Windows 11. Wordpad got dropped recently from Windows, entirely, around the same time. Just FYI.
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Are there any companies besides Microsoft and Adobe that hate their customers so much that they take away already existing features cause people want to keep them?
cough Courier cough.
cough Courier cough.
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The big difference is printing, which Notepad is not good for. Wordpad is, or was.
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The EASIEST way to trial different flavors of Linux is to simply run it from a USB thumb drive. No modifications needed to your desktop hard drive AT ALL.
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SteamOS WILL install to an all AMD system, but Bazzite is probably what you really want. Look it up. It's super easy to install, works with Nvidia and AMD GPUs and gives you that "SteamOS" experience.
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Also, WINE now runs a surprising number of Windows apps. I use both the VM and Wine. Don't miss Windows one bit. I am running Linux Mint 22.1 and have been on Linux only at home for over a decade.
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I'm still wondering how this is going to pan out with 11 being a non-option for so many perfectly fine pcs. Windows enshitification continues to be inspired by the market's acceptance of Android device negelect.
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<wave>
I have Cinnamon and KDE available. I mostly use KDE, because Kzones is somewhat better than the Cinnamon/GNOME equivalent.
I will give Windows it's due, though: neither is up to the level of Fancyzones.
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Notepad also has at least some text formatting; bold, etc.
Which IMO has no place in Notepad, but what do I know?
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I've run Linux for (gasp!) 30 years now. I use Linux Mint with the Mate desktop. All free software. I have an old W10 laptop for the odd application that doesn't run well under Wine or on Linux natively. I do have a dual boot W11/Mint Alienware M18. The W11 disk is in there for when I get a new laptop and sell the M18. My wife has a Macbook Air. Our home network has 4 Raspberry Pis (the Pi4 is a server, 2 are pihole nodes and one is a print server), the Macbook, a Linux server, 2 linux laptops, ipFire router (Linux-based) and the W10 laptop. A couple of phones and tablets round out the menagerie.
I worked at Symantec in its very early (pre-Gordon Eubanks) days. A friend and I got sent to the first WIndows developer conference. Windows 1 was tiled only and was, frankly, awful. But I had used Altos and SUNs at Stanford. No comparison.
I ran RHEL at LANL as my primary workstation and I don't think many people knew that I wasn't on Windows.
Dumping Windows as completely as possible has been a blessing.
I worked at Symantec in its very early (pre-Gordon Eubanks) days. A friend and I got sent to the first WIndows developer conference. Windows 1 was tiled only and was, frankly, awful. But I had used Altos and SUNs at Stanford. No comparison.
I ran RHEL at LANL as my primary workstation and I don't think many people knew that I wasn't on Windows.
Dumping Windows as completely as possible has been a blessing.
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Office is a superset product in that no one uses all or even most of its features, but some people care a lot about all of its features. Certainly stuff has been added to Office in the last decade that have improved my work, even though I’m not a power user by any means.
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I moved to 11 earlier this year. I held off for a long while because I prefer 10’s menu. On the whole 11 is better but it’s really dumb after all this time they still haven’t fixed issues with the start menu and task bar. What do these thousands of people do all day?
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AlaskanDruid
Ars Scholae Palatinae
It is an Office Suite. There is no reason that it couldn't run on Windows XP unless Microsoft is purposely sabotaging it's own products... ... ... hmm.
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password123
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Great rant Zippy.
Newer versions of Office somehow need hardware acceleration for whatever reason, to get those 2D pixels rendered. Though for decades, machines got by just fine without hardware acceleration for freaking office doc rendering. But now it's a really big deal so we need that GPU to get our 2D docs rendered. Is it really that hard to draw Comic Sans onscreen without the aid of the GPU? To be fair it's not just Office but the whole Windows stack, meaning DWM specifically and our windows shiny bits, like transparency and crap. Probably the best thing to do is to set Performance Options to "Adjust for best performance", and deal with less eye candy that apparently is too computationally intensive for a Windows system.
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password123
Ars Scholae Palatinae
They are on "A" "I" pursuits. Feels like the rest of MS is suffering for it, given the amount of recent bugs getting delivered on a daily basis.
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It's funny you mention that. We have some lab software that outputs data to a txt file, and in certain instances it simply cannot format properly in new notepad (there's a hand-off from one program to the next). We have to map a shortcut to legacy notepad (it's still there, hidden away) and edit the files manually to become compliamt whenever that glitch happens.
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Office problems on Windows 11? Too effing bad, apparently. All the problems I had with Office via 365 on my previous work computer with Windows 10 are still present on my newer computer with Windows 11. Meanwhile, Office 2007 on my personal computer works flawlessly; no sense paying for newer Office (even if didn't have problems with it at work) if Microsoft isn't going to actually invest any of that money into the product.
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Copilot and updates.
(Note that they don't fix the update process itself to not suck, just push out updates.)
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I find it a better experience to install windows as a vm on a Linux system.
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Just staying on W10 - there are enough options for handling security to make that a viable choice.
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I find it quite incredible I use pretty much the same feature set in Word 365 as I did in Word 2.0 more than three decades ago. The last feature I remember thinking "that's cool" was when Word 6.0 brought in smart quotes and the ability to change letter case, Threatening to not bring in more "features" sounds like an incredibly empty threat. The fact millions have switched over to Google Docs with a far smaller feature set than Word, but can still do their work, tells you everything you need to know about feature bloat.
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Am I bothered that Mirosoft are telling you to adopt their current (out for 4 years now) OS rather than one that came out a decade ago?
Not really.
There's a bit of psychosis around this that is only ever applied to Microsoft. The security requirements are a pain if your hardware doesn't meet spec, but some of those affected machines were fairly new in 2021, and very much aren't now.
Not really.
There's a bit of psychosis around this that is only ever applied to Microsoft. The security requirements are a pain if your hardware doesn't meet spec, but some of those affected machines were fairly new in 2021, and very much aren't now.
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By not upgrading, you will miss all the awesome AI features they are planning to add to office!
/s
/s
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All of the cloud collaboration stuff is new. If your organisation uses SharePoint then there are a lot of genuinely useful tie-ins; the comptroller can fix up budget data in Excel and the engineering managers can immediately see in Planner or Teams which lines just got changed. Four people can edit the same word doc at the same time without breaking it. Things like that.
There are also about a dozen new M365 apps whose names are unmemorable but which serve some apparently useful functions to some people.
But much of it was rushed to production without proper testing, and is therefore buggier than a Florida swamp.
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Last 10 years? I think so, though my gut says 2021 was peak and the last few years have been pretty bloated.
Other people have mentioned how live collaboration is built in to the desktop applications now, and some of the newer useful Excel functions. My personal favorite example is Power Query - you can import data into Excel by defining an external connections in some structured format like JSON, define how fields in the source map to columns including format, splitting, merging, and text transformations, and have the output go into a table that automatically refreshes when the source changes. It’s the incredibly useful for doing analysis on external data and Google Sheets isn’t even close.
Tables in Excel are really quite nice. You can write formulas that reference columns by table name and column name instead of sheet and cell. Not sure when they added that, timeline-wise, but I miss them when I have to use Sheets at work.
Plots in Excel are still unmatched too, IMO. To get anything as capable I have to use Python with a plotting library. For me it’s a “thousand papercuts” situation but one specific named example might be Pivot Charts. It’s exactly what it sounds like and nope Sheets doesn’t have that either.
I’ll be switching my desktop to Linux around October, but I’m going to miss Excel. I haven’t tried LibreOffice in a while - if folks could say whether it’s caught up to Excel in respects that would be a relief.
Not on the 10 year timeline but as a postscript, I even like “The Ribbon”. For people who started using Office with the original menus and built all their muscle memory and workflows that way, I can totally understand disliking it and finding it unsightly. But I started to learn and use Office products around the first ribbon release in 2007 (yes, am baby) and with the 2010 version I really, really liked it. It is much more discoverable, brings most options to a max of 3 clicks away, and works really well with keyboard navigation (Alt marks every tab with a letter, you press a letter, it marks every button with a letter, you press another letter. Like 3 clicks, but 3 keys!) And when you don’t want to look at it, double click the tab bar and it’s gone.
Again, if someone tells me LibreOffice has improved a lot that would be awesome. And I do need to go try it again regardless. Microsoft and Google both are busily cramming their respective generative AI products into every available orifice in their office products and Apple never really cared about theirs in the first place.
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Zoom slides (terribly named, even before the unrelated videocall platform became popular, but quite useful) in Powerpoint were a fairly big deal, by the standards of office suites. I think they were introduced in the 2019 version.
Edit: also, at some point they introduced dark mode, which is nice if you use it at the OS level and don't want blinding white documents to stand out.
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I just watched Jayztwocents doing his first time with Linux. He was pleasantly surprised. Ubuntu since 2021 for me. It's also a gaming machine as well. Proton Experimental will run most things.
Occasionally I'll turn on a W11 box but it's such an hassle. Ubuntu right out of the box, gave me Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice and drum-roll.....Solitaire.
Occasionally I'll turn on a W11 box but it's such an hassle. Ubuntu right out of the box, gave me Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice and drum-roll.....Solitaire.
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I feel Excel's plots are its weak point and in desperate need of overhaul. They are not even comparable to what you can get with modern plotting tools, like R's ggplot. You don't see Excel graphs in any publications nowadays.
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I certainly won’t argue that they’re as flexible or capable as what you can achieve with a programming language and a good plotting library. (When I don’t have Excel my go-to has been Python+Polars+Plotly, I really like its distribution plots.) I had more in mind “competing” products that people tend to suggest as replacements, where it’s kind of the point to not have to drop to a scripting language to make a decent scatterplot. We probably also just have different needs or “consumers” - I’m not trying to match a journal’s style guide, but it’s awfully nice to be able to toggle and filter series interactively right on the plot!
Again, it’s been a while since I’ve tried LibreOffice, so I could well be out of date in that regard. I couldn’t even get Google Sheets to use values from a series for error bars.
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Obviously not a lot of heavy Excel users commenting here. Excel’s compute engine was completely changed with the addition of dynamic arrays, arrays being (almost) a first class object, and dynamic array functions and lambda functions that allow user defined function creation and LINQ/APL/LISP like data operations. All added in Excel 2021 and Office 365 a bit earlier.
There are new features and functionality in this area being added all the time but there also a few major points that need improvement, such as combining Tables and dynamic arrays, and cleaning up the legacy functions that don’t work properly with dynamic arrays.
Edit: Also like to acknowledge the commenter that mentioned the incorporation of Power Query as a native feature instead of an add-in as a major improvement, though it needs (much) more work than dynamic arrays still.
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