Microsoft stops supporting Office 2021 apps on 13 October 2026
Reviewed by Helen Jones
Microsoft’s official lifecycle list sets 13 October 2026 as end of support for the 2021 desktop suite, including Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, Publisher, Project and Visio. After that date Microsoft will not issue security updates, other updates, paid or free assisted support, or fresh online technical content for those products. The apps do not uninstall themselves. The same calendar lists other 2026 cutoffs, including several Azure cognitive services on 1 October 2026 and later servicing limits for Windows 11 Home and Pro version 24H2. The page does not migrate users or change Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing.
Until now, many teams could treat perpetual Office 2021 as a stable, offline-enough place to keep drafts, spreadsheets and meeting notes, then paste pieces into ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot when they needed help. That habit looked cheap and private because the files lived on a known desktop, even if the AI step was still a one-off chat. After 13 October 2026 those desktops become an unpatched layer under the same files you feed into AI. The risk is not that Word vanishes. It is that security, file formats and cloud Copilot features drift apart while your team still has no shared rule for context, review or where company documents may be stored. Unsupported Office plus ad-hoc prompting is a workflow that fails quietly.
Analysis
This is a change to watch, not a reason to buy a new AI stack. Ask IT or check Help About in Word and Excel this week, then write one operating rule: if the team is still on Office 2021, those files stay in approved company storage and are not pasted into consumer chat tools after a named cutoff you set before October.
Source note
Pulse published by Collab365 Spaces, reviewed by Helen Jones on . Cite as "Microsoft stops supporting Office 2021 apps on 13 October 2026", Collab365 Spaces. 1 source referenced.