We wanted to highlight apps that anyone can use, so we excluded those that are specific to third-party tools.īroad Use Cases: There’s a lot you can do with apps and add-ons without leaving Microsoft’s interface-find restaurants on Yelp, search Wikipedia, and buy flowers-but we wanted to focus on the types of apps you could realistically use daily.Īll 365 Applications: We only included apps that work for all Office 365 subscription types (Home, Student, and Business). Some of the add-ins have paid upgrades, but the basic features described for each add-in are free to use.īroad Audience: Many available apps and add-ins are for specific programs like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Trello-they require the use of a third-party program. To simplify things, we looked through over 100 of the highest-rated apps for each product (Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), installed and tested 47 add-ins that stood out for their different features, and narrowed the results down using the following criteria:įree: There are a lot of promising paid apps available for Office products, but we wanted to focus on the best free add-ins. There are over 2,000 add-ins for Microsoft Office 365-and more that only work on specific versions of Office for Windows and Mac. How We Selected the Featured Microsoft Office Add-ins To reactivate your Office applications, reconnect to the Internet.New to Office Online? Check our in-depth guides to Excel Online and PowerPoint Online to get the most out of Microsoft's free Office web apps. If you don’t connect to the Internet at least every 31 days, your applications will go into reduced functionality mode, which means that you can view or print your documents but cannot edit the documents or create new ones. You should also connect to the Internet regularly to keep your version of Office up to date and benefit from automatic upgrades. Internet access is also required to access documents stored on OneDrive, unless you install the OneDrive desktop app.

For Microsoft 365 plans, internet access is also needed to manage your subscription account, for example to install Office on other PCs or to change billing options. However, Internet access is required to install and activate all the latest releases of Office suites and all Microsoft 365 subscription plans.

You don’t need to be connected to the Internet to use Office applications, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, because the applications are fully installed on your computer.

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