Buy Microsoft Excel: Which Version to Choose and What It Costs

Looking to buy Microsoft Excel without a yearly subscription? Here, Excel comes inside a genuine Office suite: the same spreadsheet, in the same version as in any Office box, with a lifetime license or a 12-month subscription. This page helps you pick the right version for your formulas, your files and your budget.

Buy Microsoft Excel alone or inside an Office suite?

Microsoft does sell a standalone Excel with a perpetual license, but at a price close to a complete suite bought new. The math is quick: a genuine second-hand Office suite costs much less and contains exactly the same spreadsheet, in the same version. You buy Excel, and Word, PowerPoint or Outlook come along with it.

You do not have to use everything. The default setup installs every app, but you can simply work in Excel alone. With the Professional Plus editions, the Office Deployment Tool and its XML configuration file even let you install only the spreadsheet on a computer with limited storage.

Which version of Excel should you choose?

Every version below reads and writes .xlsx files and handles PivotTables, VBA macros and Power Query. The differences lie in the recent calculation functions, the apps that come with Excel and the license model.

The real turning point is Excel 2021: it introduced XLOOKUP and dynamic arrays, which replace most long array formulas, along with the LET function. Excel 2024 adds text-splitting and range-stacking functions and lets you place pictures inside cells with the IMAGE function. If you share workbooks with colleagues on Microsoft 365, aim for Excel 2021 at least, so that their formulas do not turn into #NAME? errors on your PC.

Support dates to keep in mind

Microsoft stopped publishing security updates for Office 2021 on 13 October 2026; Excel 2021 keeps working exactly as before, and your workbooks are not affected.

Office 2024 Professional Plus is supported until October 2029, which makes it the long-term choice for a work computer. For home budgets and lists, Office 2021 Professional Plus remains the budget lifetime option.

Home, freelance or business use: what really changes

For home use, such as a family budget, expense tracking, lists or school marks, any version on this page is more than enough: formulas, charts, conditional formatting and PivotTables work the same way.

For a freelancer or a small business, the focus shifts to quotes, bank reconciliation and CSV imports from a bank or an online shop. Power Query (Data tab, then Get Data) becomes the central tool for cleaning and refreshing these imports in one click, and it is built into every desktop version listed here. For large data models, Power Pivot is included in the Professional Plus editions.

In a team, one habit matters above all: align versions. A workbook built with Excel 2024 functions and opened in an older Excel will show errors, while the opposite works without any problem. To get more out of your formulas, see our guide to the essential Excel functions. And when a list turns into a real database, with duplicates and several people typing into it, Microsoft Access, included in the Professional Plus editions, is often the better tool: see how to buy Microsoft Access.

Excel on several devices or on a Mac

The lifetime suites on this page install on one Windows PC per key. If you work on a desktop, a laptop and a tablet, or on a Mac, the Office 365 subscription covers up to 5 devices for 12 months at 9,99 €, with Excel always up to date. Your .xlsx files move between Windows and macOS without conversion; only VBA macros that rely on Windows-specific features may need adjusting on a Mac.

Why does Excel cost less here?

The licenses we sell are neither cut-down versions nor generic keys: they are genuine Microsoft licenses from renewed European company equipment, put back into circulation on the second-hand market. The Court of Justice of the European Union confirmed this practice in its UsedSoft judgment (case C-128/11): a software license sold permanently in the European Union may be resold.

On the practical side, Excel 2021 and 2024 install on Windows 11 and Windows 10, in 32-bit or 64-bit, with Microsoft’s official installer. You activate in Excel, under File then Account, by entering the key received by email. Since .xlsx has been the standard format since 2007, your old workbooks open without conversion or loss of formatting. Each order comes with a VAT invoice, a faulty key is replaced for the lifetime of the license, and our support team answers by email 7 days a week, within 2 hours on average. Browse the complete Office catalog to compare every edition.