Microsoft 365 business prices jumped on July 1, 2026, and if you manage a company or government subscription your next renewal will cost more. The increase hits Business, Enterprise, Frontline, and Government plans, with rises ranging from 0% to a steep 43%. Home users on Personal, Family, Premium, and Education
The AI engine inside your Excel and Outlook may have changed in the last few weeks, and Microsoft never told you. Microsoft has quietly started routing some Copilot prompts to its own MAI models instead of the OpenAI and Anthropic technology that used to do the work. The Copilot button
Microsoft has given Windows 10 extended support another year of life, pushing the free consumer ESU deadline to October 2027 or . If you run Microsoft 365 or Office on Windows 10, that sounds like good news, but it changes almost nothing for your Office apps. Microsoft 365 updates and
Microsoft’s new Surface 8GB RAM models look like a bargain, but they are a trap. In June 2026 Microsoft quietly added 8GB versions of the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop that cost more than last year’s 16GB models while giving you half the memory. 8GB is less than what most
Microsoft Teams now puts a Test mic and speaker button right on the meeting join screen, so you can run a quick audio check in the seconds before you click Join. Teams has let you test audio for years. What is new is where the test lives and how fast
Wondering when your version of Microsoft Office stops getting security updates? This is the plain English Microsoft Office support end dates checklist, kept current for 2026. Microsoft 365, Office 2024, Office 2021 and every older release run out of security and bug fixes on different dates, and once that day
Microsoft now has two different apps both called Copilot, and the naming is genuinely confusing. The Copilot app is a free, standalone AI chatbot built into Windows. The Microsoft 365 Copilot app is something else entirely: the old Microsoft 365 hub for your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, now with
Outlook search has vastly improved with Immersive Search, and if your mailbox has a Copilot plan attached, it is worth trying today. Instead of hunting for exact keywords, you can type a plain English question like and get a real answer, complete with links back to the source emails. It
Microsoft has rebuilt the PowerToys Shortcut Guide, and this version finally earns a place in every Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Office user’s toolkit. Instead of a generic list of Windows shortcuts, the guide is now app aware. Open Word, Excel, Outlook classic, PowerPoint, Access, OneNote, Project, Publisher or Visio, and
Random numbers in Excel are easier than most people think, and you have three main tools to choose from: RAND() for decimals between 0 and 1, RANDBETWEEN() for whole numbers in a range, and RANDARRAY() for filling whole blocks of cells at once. This guide shows you how to make
Choosing 64-bit or 32-bit Office sounds like a decision that matters, but for almost everyone it does not. Since around 2020, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Office have installed as 64-bit software by default, and that is the right choice for nearly every Windows PC. The 64-bit version is faster, uses
Just installed Microsoft 365 or Office on a new PC? Before you open a single document, do one quick thing: check for updates. We did a clean install straight from Microsoft using the standard “Click to Run” method, expecting the newest version, and within minutes an update check found fresh
Quick Parts in New Outlook for Windows and web lets you save reusable chunks of text, complete with formatting, images and tables, then drop them into any email in two clicks. Standard replies, disclaimers, directions to your office or a greeting you type fifty times a week: save it once
Reusable content in Outlook should be simple, but Microsoft has turned it into a confusing tangle of overlapping tools with near identical names. Mail Templates, My Templates and two completely different features both called Quick Parts all promise to save you retyping the same email text, yet each one works
Microsoft now has a free Microsoft AI Playground where you can test its own in-house AI models with no Azure account and no credit card, just a Microsoft login. The MAI Playground opens up three models to try: MAI-Voice-2 for text to speech, MAI-Image-2.5 for text to image, and MAI-Transcribe-1.5
PowerPoint 365 with Copilot now hides a useful choice that most people never notice: separate AI image models for making slide graphics. Tucked below the main model selector are four options, GPT-Image-2, GPT-Image-1.5, MAI Image 2.5 and Flux.2 Flex, each with real strengths and weaknesses. Picking the right one means
Microsoft UK promotes a single “Student, NHS and Armed Forces discount” banner, which makes the Microsoft 365 UK discounts look identical for everyone. They are not even close. Students can get Microsoft 365 free for years, while NHS staff and armed forces members get only a small hardware discount and
Microsoft stops all security updates for Office 2021 on October 13, 2026, with no extension and no paid reprieve. After that date, every newly discovered flaw in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook stays unpatched forever, leaving home users and businesses more exposed to attackers each month. You do not need
Microsoft’s June 2026 blog post pitches five new Outlook for Windows productivity features as reasons to abandon classic Outlook. The reality is less impressive. Two of the five already exist in classic Outlook, often in a stronger form, a third has a close equivalent. Three only work properly on Microsoft
Microsoft Word’s Draft view is meant to keep editing simple by stripping away page layout, margins, and headers so you can focus on the words. But a new bug in recent Word 365 builds for Windows and Mac is breaking one of its most useful cues: the faint dotted lines
The Microsoft 365 Workplace Discount Program (WDP) cuts 30% off Microsoft 365 Premium, Family and Personal for employees of companies and government agencies that buy Microsoft volume licenses with Software Assurance. Formerly the Home Use Program, the WDP is now simple to claim: enter your work email, verify, and link
Microsoft lists a Microsoft 365 Canadian military discount in its own legal Terms and Conditions, sitting right beside the well known US Military Appreciation Subscription. There is just one problem. Nobody can actually buy it. CANEX, the Canadian Forces Exchange System named directly in Microsoft’s terms, says it has no
New Outlook is slower and far hungrier for memory than classic Outlook, and new testing shows just how bad the gap is. Click a new email notification in Windows 11 and new Outlook can take around 10 seconds to show that message, while classic Outlook opens it almost instantly. New
Excel lets you pick which AI model Copilot uses, and the list keeps growing: various GPT options, two Claude Opus and the heavyweight Claude Fable 5 (maybe). If you do not understand the difference, you are not alone. This plain English guide explains what each Copilot AI model for Excel
