Microsoft Office
Guides, comparisons and buying advice for Microsoft Office — perpetual licences, edition differences, and how to get the right version for your needs.
Yes — but the answer depends entirely on which Office you bought, and the method most guides still describe stopped working in December 2025. Microsoft retired the automated activation phone line and replaced it with a web portal, which means the machine you are activating may never need an internet connection, while you will need […]
Access vs Excel is usually framed as a choice between two tools. There are really four options, and the one most people are missing is already installed on their PC. The deciding factor is almost never how much data you have — it is how many people are typing into it, and whether the records […]
Since April, a spreadsheet has been a filing tool. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax went live on 6 April 2026, and HMRC accepts records kept in spreadsheets provided they reach it through compatible bridging software — which quietly turned the version of Excel sitting on your practice’s desks into a support question rather than […]
Microsoft licensing has its own vocabulary, and most of it was written for procurement departments rather than for the person trying to work out which version of Office to buy. This is a plain-English reference to the terms you will actually run into — on product pages, in activation errors, in a supplier’s quote, or […]
Microsoft ended support for Office 2016 on 14 October 2025. Ten months on, if you open Word 2016 this morning, it starts up exactly as it always has — which is precisely why most people who worried about it last autumn have stopped. Nothing visible happened. But the risk from unsupported software was never going […]
Search for Microsoft Access and you’ll find a decade of people announcing its death. The question deserves a straight answer, because there is a real Access deadline in 2026 — it just isn’t the one most of the internet is worried about. The only perpetual route to Access 2024 Office Professional Plus 2024 Access 2024 […]
Lifecycle · UK Buyer’s Guide Updated 8 October 2026: Windows 10 consumer Extended Security Updates no longer end on 13 October. Microsoft extended them to 12 October 2027, and this guide has been corrected throughout. Microsoft is retiring more products on 13 October 2026 than on any other single day this decade. Office 2021 in […]