Office Professional Plus: The affordable alternative without a subscription

Extract:

You can use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher and Access in the classic Office 2019 Professional Plus version without committing to an annual subscription fee. The good thing is that the cost is even lower than an annual fee for an Office 365 subscription.

Article:

For those who want to use the Office [365] package with its components, Office Professional Plus is highly recommended, because Office Professional Plus contains all Windows office programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher and Access in the classic 2019 version. This means that all of these programs can be used offline. No internet connection is required except for installation and updates. The package is only available for Windows 10 (and likely Windows 11 in the future).

As the name suggests, the Office Professional Plus license is highly sufficient forbusiness use. No distinction is made between private and commercial use.

This makes the package ideal for dedicated private individuals as well as for small companies that may even expand in the future. The software can be installed in almost all common languages and of course, also in German.

The special feature and thus the main difference to the Office 365 license is that, unlike Office 365, no subscription is required to use Office Professional Plus. Instead, a key is purchased for a one-time activation, therefore not subject to any runtime limitationand

only limited by the lifetime of the hardware on which the software was installed. This makes Office Professional Plus significantly cheaper than the subscription package for Office 365, which requires a license fee every year.

Finally, there are no compatibility issues with Professional Plus, as it supports all documents created with Office 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010 and 2007, as well as Office for Mac 2011 and 2008. If the documents are older, there is a ‘compatibility package’ that can simply be installed with it.

What are the hardware and software requirements for using Office Professional Plus?

Windows 10 is required as the operating system for installation of Office Professional Plus on a PC. Logically, internet access is required to download the program and register it. Once the programs are installed, there is no need for an internet connection to use the programs.

A Microsoft account is not required with Office 2019 Professional Plus. The hardware does not need any special requirements. A 1.6 GHz, dual-core processor is specified as a system requirement so that the programs run stably. 4 GB, 2 GB (32-bit) RAM is what every computer has anyway, and 4 GB should still be free on the hard drive.

Differences: Office Professional Plus vs. Office 365

Because the Office Professional Plus is cheaper than the annual Microsoft 365 subscription, there are also a few other special features. The package is installed on an end device and retains the license as long as no changes are made to the device, such as a new installation or component replacement,therefore, there is no need to renew the license. The license is valid for the programs without any additional services.

Additional services that a Microsoft Office 365 subscription includes are not included in the Office Professional Plus package. For example, there is no upgrade option, no 60 Skype minutes per month, and no Microsoft chat and phone support. Likewise, the one TB of OneDrive storage is not included in the Professional Plus package price.