The latest release of Microsoft Office includes plenty of interesting enhancements and improvements across all its components. Which in this version, Home and Student, includes a 1-PC lifetime licence, designed for PC users working from home or on their laptop, and suitable for commercial use.

Word 2021 is the defacto word processor and the latest version protects you untrusted documents (any you've just downloaded, say) in a sandbox, where malicious code can't interfere with your settings. It's easy to apply a range of visual effects to text, new SmartArt graphics help build impressive diagrams, and you can edit pictures from within Word, no further software required.

Excel 2021 gains several visualisation tools: Sparklines displays small graphs in single cells, while the Slicer helps filter pivot tables to display precisely the data you need. But if you need industrial-strength analytical capabilities, then the new PowerPivot for Excel add-in makes it easy to work with information from many different sources, and can handle datasets with millions of rows.

PowerPoint 2021 is now able to broadcast presentations across any network. There's support for collaborative working, allowing multiple authors to work on the same Word and PowerPoint documents. And once saved online, you can continue to work on your Office 2021 documents just about anywhere through Microsoft Web Apps, on PCs, laptops or even smartphones.

New in 2021 is the addition of collaboration tools, enabling teams to co-author the same documents, improved comment collaboration, a quick-view feature to see who is editing your documents and much more. See the "What's New in Office 2021" on the Microsoft website for detailed information.

Note that you do not get Outlook 2021 with the Home & Student version of Office 2021.

Microsoft Office Home & Student 2021 includes a 1-PC lifetime licence for one person to use on a single PC. Unlike Microsoft 365, Office 2021 will never need renewing.

Review by Mike Williams.