Yes, it’s true: Microsoft would prefer for its customers to not buy Office 2019. But that’s because Office 365 is superior.

“There’s a world of difference between the Office 365 and Office 2019,” Microsoft corporate vice president Jared Spataro explains. “Office 365 includes fully installed Office applications—including the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. And these apps keep getting better over time, with new capabilities delivered every month. Most importantly, Office 365 is connected to the cloud, so you can access your content from any device, coauthor with anyone in real-time (regardless of whether or not they’ve purchased a copy of Office), and use the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to create more impactful content with less effort.”

By comparison, the standalone Office 2019 application suite is “frozen in time,” because it is never updated with new features and is not cloud-connected, Microsoft says.

To test this claim, the firm pitted Office 365 and Office 2019 against each other in a head-to-head showdown, challenging three sets of twins to complete the same tasks in both versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The resulting videos are pretty interesting, if not surprising. You can find them on Microsoft’s new Showdown website.

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