OnTheHub

Microsoft Office is a staple of student life. Whether you’re plotting data in Excel, presenting with PowerPoint, or drafting an essay in Word, you will definitely use Office in your classes.

So hopefully you get as excited as we do when Microsoft releases a new version of Office. And what makes the recent release of Office 2019 especially exciting is that eligible students can get it for as little to no cost from their school’s OnTheHub WebStore.

To celebrate, let’s look at what this new version of Office brings to the table. Here are five exciting ways students will benefit from Office 2019.

#1 – Stay Focussed

Concentrating on assignments can be hard enough without a thousand little things competing for your attention. Thankfully, Word is getting a new Focus Mode, designed to shut out distractions on your desktop so you can get work done faster.

Outlook has a new way to reduce distractions too. The Focused Inbox separates important email from the trivial stuff, so you won’t need to scroll through all your junk mail to find the messages that matter. And if you’d rather see all your new mail in one place, or if you don’t trust Outlook to determine what’s important for you, don’t worry; this feature is as easy to turn off and on as a light switch.

#2 – Analyze in Style

Number-crunchers will see major benefits from Office 2019. Excel is getting a slew of new and improved tools to help students generate reports, data models, and sophisticated analyses.

Microsoft has streamlined the process of exporting table data from Excel to Power BI, turning a time-consuming hassle into a three-click breeze. You can also sign in to Power BI or create a Power BI account directly through Excel. Combined with enhancements to Power Query and Power Pivot, plus other cool features like 2D maps and funnel charts, Excel 2019 will be a powerful new tool in any STEM student’s belt.

#3 – Ink with Ease

Early adopters of digital pens might have worried they’d turn out to be just a novelty. Those concerns should be long gone by now. Microsoft has consistently supported and developed new ways to use these pen-like peripherals. In Office 2019, inking features have only gotten better.

The roaming pencil case turns your screen into a canvas and makes working in Office as intuitive as the stroke of a pen. This feature lets you write or draw directly on a PowerPoint slide or in a Word document using your choice of pen type and ink colour. You can also use your pen to crop images, move objects around your screen, highlight text, and erase what you’ve drawn. And pressure sensitivity and tilt effects open the door to even more pen functionality across the Office suite.

#4 – Avoid the Cloud

Some students may not see this as a selling point, as subscription-based services like Office 365 offer lots of benefits. However, others may not be as comfortable subscribing to software instead of owning it.

Office 2019 is the best choice for students who aren’t quite ready to make the leap into the cloud. It’s the first “perpetual” version of Office Microsoft has released since 2016. This means that once you order Office 2019, you have permanent access to Word, PowerPoint, Excel and more – all on your computer, for as long as you want. You won’t need to sign in online to access your software or worry about losing access when a subscription expires. With Office 2019, you can set it and forget it – the software is yours for life and always at your fingertips.

#5 – Get it at No Cost!

This isn’t a feature of the software, but it is great news. If your school offers Office 2019 through an OnTheHub WebStore, you may be eligible to get it at a massive discount – or even for no cost!

To take advantage of the upgrades and benefits listed above, click the link above to see the deals your school may offer on Office 2019. And if there’s an aspect of the new Office that you’re excited to try but that didn’t make this list, make it known in the comments below.