Microsoft Office has over 1.5 billion happy users from students, small-business owners, and professionals. It offers varied Office suites, which are helpful to boosts users’ productivity. Its flagship tools come in different versions and editions. But many people get confused about how to use these two terms. It is necessary to learn about their meanings to avoid using them as interchangeably.

The version denotes the number of the MS Office like in 2016 and 2019. However, editions are like ‘Home and Business’ or ‘Home and Students’. In this blog, our focus is on discussing editions. And so we will differentiate on Microsoft Office 2016 Professional Plus vs Home and Business editions.

What is Microsoft Office 2016?

MS Office plays a great role in providing users a space for creativity. As the name suggests, it offers office management tools to create a good workspace for work to happen. With the 2016 version, the cloud-based file sharing and editing features have enabled users to perform efficiently. Let us see the top features in Office 2016:

1. Co-authoring: With this, the real-time editing can be done and seen by the co-workers on the same document. It makes the task gets done on time and changes saved simultaneously.
2. Smooth sharing: The task of sharing the document is now readily available on the same screen. You can find it in the upper-right corner, a simplified way for fast sharing of documents. To use this, you need to sign in to your Microsoft account and always be ready to perform on the go.
3. Improved email: Through outlook, managing email becomes easy with the Clutter feature. This new edition enables the user to designate email on a priority basis. Like, mark them with a new category as inbox triage toolbox or Clutter. It makes the overall email category into four as- important, junk, deletes, and clutter.
4. New templates in excel: The 2016 version gets added with new templates in Excel. The previous version was outdated, so Microsoft has added Waterfall, Pareto, Box, Sunburst, Treemap, etc.

Microsoft offers two standalone suites for business. They are Office Professional 2016 and Office Home & Business 2016. Both the Office editions support the business needs with their in-built programs. For example, excel proves to be very efficient in making a monthly budget. The end-of-the-year budget is also easy to get, which helps ascertain where the company has made profit or loss.

What is Microsoft Office Home and Business?

Since every business requirements are different and depending on the scale of operations, the need for Office also varies. For small and medium-sized businesses, the Office Home and Business is sufficient.

The flagship products offered in MS Office Home and Business edition contain Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It does not include OneNote and instead provides the Outlook for business goals of managing emails and appointments.

What is Microsoft Office 2016 Professional Plus?

The Office 2016 Professional Plus promotes individual efficiency with an advanced toolset for comprehensive business needs. In fact, what you get in the above Home and Business Office suite, you receive the same in the Professional Plus but with three additional tools. Since some specialized business functions need special attention, these extra programs are meant to keep work aligned with modern times.

Apart from Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, you get to enjoy working on OneNote, Publisher, and Access. Let us discuss these three in detail:

OneNote: It is a note and ideas-keeping application, a perfect individual section to pin important information. Compatible with the different digital formats, including multimedia like video and audio notes. You can also save ideas in handwritten notes and share them by converting them to text. What’s more, you can easily integrate the OneNote files with different working platforms. Other than Microsoft apps, if you use Zapier, it can connect with software like Slack, Salesforce, and Trello.

Publisher: To create professional work without hiring a professional gets done with the help of the Publisher app. It is an entry-level tool that allows the user to make layout, effects, and pictures for promotion and marketing like a specialist will do. So if you want to make a newsletter, greeting cards, brochures, postcards, you can get it done like a graphic designer.

Access: It is used for managing a large pool of data to develop application software. With no risk of human error, it is best for software developers to data architects for making websites with its in-built VBA programming tool. It helps to manage accounts and bills efficiently. The major component of access includes- tables, macros, queries, reports, modules for comparing vast data and finding a relationship between them.

A comparison:

1. There are five programs in Home and Business, whereas seven are in Professional Plus.
2. The price of Professional Plus is expensive than the Home and Business Office suite.
3. For small and medium-sized companies, Home and Business are suitable, while for specialized work one should prefer Professional Plus.
4. Professional Plus allows users to create a database from the office tools, which are not available in the Office Home and Business one.

If you are looking for an affordable solution for buying Office programs, then DirectDeals is the right place for you. They offer amazing deals for you to save and work at your budget conveniently. Make your work-capable with the Office suite tools and analyze the information in a meaningful way.