By Mary J. Carey 
Chances are that you are already using Microsoft 365 and you know how powerful it is. Microsoft 365-formerly Microsoft Office and Office 365 – is the giant among office suites. It is full of features, available online and offline, is regularly updated and facilitates collaboration more than its competitors. The most important caveat is that so many complex features can sometimes be overwhelming. To its credit, Microsoft is working on it. Outlook, for example, is being replaced by the new Outlook, which is easier to use. Already the best overall office suite, Microsoft 365 is an Editors’ Choice winner, and streamlining should only improve it.
How much does Microsoft 365 cost?
Unlike competing suites, Microsoft offers 365 native applications for all major platforms, with the exception of Linux. The complete Suite works as a set of subscription-based desktop applications on Windows and macOS, with free mobile versions on iOS and Android and free web versions for each browser, making the Suite available on the Internet for all platforms, including Linux.
Microsoft 365 is a rapidly evolving suite with updates every two or three weeks, often with new features added that change the user interface in ways that take some getting used to. (The free online Suite Google Docs, Sheets and slides also includes frequent updates, but with less radical changes than Microsoft’s.)
Windows-based business packages include the Microsoft Publisher desktop publishing application and the Microsoft Access database, applications that are mainly used by organizations that have been using older versions of these applications for decades. Users with a perpetual license receive biweekly security updates that are automatically installed by Windows Update.
Microsoft 365 enterprise customers now have access to Microsoft’s AI-powered co-pilots. This Service promises to summarize a document or a meeting, create ideas for a presentation and help you sort out your ideas. We haven’t tested this service thoroughly yet, but we looked at Copilot for Windows from the very beginning.
Microsoft Word, the choice of the wordsmith
Despite its often major inconveniences and occasional instability, Word surpasses its competitors in almost all respects for beginners and intermediates. Beginners can choose from hundreds of stylish template templates that can be downloaded directly from the new Word menu. Word’s complex interface takes a while to master, but it can be a cornucopia of details. Right-click on the status bar at the bottom of the Word window to get an idea of the dozens of things it can tell you about your documents.
On the other hand, if you want to focus on the text you are writing, Word also offers a distraction-free focus mode. Just click on the Focus button in the toolbar at the bottom of the window and immediately switch to full-screen editing mode without visible menus, with just a scroll bar and buttons at the top that restore the default window or close the file. If you have a two-monitor setup, the focus mode will only work on one monitor. So you should turn off your second monitor if you don’t want distractions. For more distraction-free writing tools, try our roundup of the best writing apps.
Word on Mac
Almost all the features of Word For Windows are also included in the Mac Version, but the Mac Version is less convenient because it lacks the myriad of keyboard shortcuts that allow advanced users to browse the Windows interface of Word. A few years ago, the Mac version of Word included unique graphical features such as a 3D display of graphic layers, which made Word’s graphical capabilities much easier to use on a Mac than on Windows. However, Microsoft has removed these features in newer versions.
A notable advantage of Word over all its competitors: advanced users get the programming language with the most features in any word processor, the same Visual Basic for applications that can be used in Excel and PowerPoint.
Excel excels
Excel has always outperformed all other spreadsheet applications in terms of speed and performance, and the current version of Microsoft 365 further increases the distance between Excel and everything else. Google Sheets has started to catch up with Excel in terms of processing speed, but it lacks a desktop application and cannot compete with Excel’s huge feature set. LibreOffice Calc is the best competitor to desktop-based Excel, but it is slower and much less feature-rich.