If you’re not an Office 365 subscriber, that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from Microsoft Office2019 Professional Plus—the latest version of the most popular productivity suite on the market. Microsoft has made several improvements over the 2017 release, and these features are worth your consideration if you want to up your office productivity game this year. You’ll find it’s easier than ever to find information in documents or quickly share files with others using these new features. Plus, since many of these features work across Macs and PCs, you can use them on whichever computer you prefer.

Office Add-Ins

Office add-ins are just one of many new and improved features in Microsoft office 2019 professional plus. With Office Add-ins, your favorite third-party software programs can integrate with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. And if that wasn't enough—as a bonus, you'll also have real-time coauthoring for spreadsheets and real-time coauthoring for presentations—eliminating the need to constantly save documents as you work together on projects. Sound good?

Office Templates

One of my favorite new features in Office is what they call Office Templates. Basically, it’s a template that allows you to create your own forms with fields pre-populated on them. So, instead of having to enter all of your company’s information manually, you can just select Office Forms from your file menu and enter data in each field. In addition, it comes with a built-in spell checker and an automatically resizing layout so it fits whatever paper size you need. It is important that you know how to use Microsoft products at home as well as at work because it will put you ahead in job interviews.

Visual Studio Code Support

Visual Studio Code is a powerful source code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. It provides comprehensive editing and debugging support, an extensibility model, and lightweight integration with existing tools. With Office 2019 you can run your favorite code editor right in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. This release of Office introduces support for external tool integration via Add-ins on Windows desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

Excel's Big Numbers

One of my favorite things about Excel is its ability to crunch big numbers. With every previous version of Excel, if you wanted to add up all of your sales for a week (or month, or year), you had no choice but to use a crude formula such as =SUM (B2:B255). For example, it’s 3:30 AM and I want to know how much our company has made in sales during 2017. To find out using Excel 2016, I would have to type in =SUM (B2:B255) and wait...and wait...and wait while my computer chews through billions of entries. My laptop gives up after 90 seconds and returns no results!

Enhanced Real Time Collaboration

Collaboration is one of those buzzwords that gets thrown around a lot, but when you’re running a business, collaboration needs to be more than just a buzzword. If you want your team to operate at peak efficiency, everyone needs to be working on projects together in real time. Microsoft Office 365 and Office 2019 both help you do that by introducing new features for co-authoring, co-editing, and real-time sharing. They also improve your team’s ability to access files from anywhere so you can get work done regardless of where people are located. In short: if you want enhanced productivity and don’t mind shelling out some extra money (which can often feel like it’s wasted), then upgrading is worth it.