2025 promises to be ‘interesting’ for Microsoft 365 and Office users, not always in a good way. Here’s some of the predictable events.
What I can guarantee in 2025 is more Copilot and Outlook (new) hype – some justified and some stretching credibility. Happy New Year!
Office 2016 and Office 2019 end
All Office 2016 and Office 2019 users should note 14 October 2025 ( about 5 months from today) as the end of support date for both products. After this date, security updates will no longer be provided for either product. See Microsoft Office upcoming support end date checklist.
Microsoft 365 price rise
There is a good chance of a price increase for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans in 2025.
Secure the current prices while they are still available, Microsoft 365 money saving chance – if you act now
More security patches
Office and Windows will get too many security bug patches. Years ago Microsoft promised a greater focus on software security and protection against hacking, but there seems no end to the security holes found in their products.
Let’s hope their patches are more rigorously tested BEFORE public release. The Windows 11 24H2 update has been badly bungled with customers still suffering.
More Excel goodies go public – please
Some Excel 365 features have been in beta limbo (i.e. Insiders releases only) for too long – seven months in one case. Let’s hope they go public sooner in 2025 rather than later.
- Regular Expressions have been available in Excel 365 Insiders releases since May 2024 through functions such as RegexTest(), RegexExtract(), and RegexReplace(). These functions implement genuine PCRE2 Regular Expressions, which are an open standard, well-documented and widely used.
- Also Xlookup() and Xmatch() received a Regex upgrade for Insiders.
- Translate() and DetectLanguage() have been in beta purgatory since August
More “important” 2025 dates
February 14th, 2025 Valentine’s Day with Microsoft Word
May 4th, 2025 Happy Star Wars Day – with Microsoft Office
March 14, 2025 “Pi Day” Circle & Sphere calculations in Excel using Pi 𝜋
January 1st, 2025 – in 2024 Microsoft Office welcomed Mickey and other public domain characters. In 2025 it’s the turn of early Popeye, Tintin, An American in Paris, Rhapsody in Blue, Singing in the Rain (song) and the first Marx Brothers film among many. All those and more fall out of US Copyright on 1 January 2025
