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How to switch between monthly and bi-annual updates for Office 365
Most people will be on either the monthly or semi-annual update channel for Office 365. This blog shows how you can find out which channel you are on, and how to change your channel.

Posted by Andy Brown on 05 August 2019

In this blog

The different update channels
Seeing what channel you're in
Changing your update channel
Getting the latest updates

Understanding and Changing Office 365 Update Channels

This blog shows a summary of the different Office 365 update channels, explains how to change your settings and shows how to download the latest updates for your version of Office.

The different update channels

If you have Office 365 (I'm using the ProPlus edition), it's almost certain that you are on one of the following two update channels:

Channel	What it means
Monthly	You get the latest updates as they're released.
Semi-annual	You get big wodges of updates, once every 6 months.

What you don't want to do is be in any channel with the word Targeted in, as this means you're acting as a guinea-pig for testing new changes.

Seeing what channel you're in

To see what channel you're in, choose File from any Office menu:

I'm using Excel as an example here.

Choose Account:

You'll need to look right to the bottom of the File menu to see this.

You can now see which version of Office you are using, and which channel you are in:

So here I'm using version 1902 of Microsoft Office, and the semi-annual channel.

You can see the current latest released Microsoft Office versions here:

What this shows is that at the time of writing I'm 5 versions behind the latest one!

Changing your update channel

You can switch from the semi-annual update channel to the monthly update channel as shown here. I've summarised (and myself followed) the steps below.

First run the registry editor: