If you don't care about package versions and just want 'the latest set of all packages in the standard Anaconda Distribution, so long as they work together', then you should take a look at this gist.

Updating just the packages in the standard Anaconda Distribution Or from the command line: conda update astroid astropy When you are done you need to click the 'Apply' button:

for astroid or astropy in the screenshot above, and this will tag those packages for an upgrade. If you are only interested in updating an individual package then simply click on the blue arrow or blue version number in Navigator, e.g. Or from the command line you can provide the environment name ( -n envname) or path ( -p /path/to/env), for example to update your dspyr environment from the screenshot above: conda update -n dspyr -all When it is selected there is a triangular marker on the right (see image above, step 3). If you have other environments you'd like to update you can repeat the process above, but first click on the environment. This operation will only update the one selected environment (in this case, the base environment). This needs to be executed from the command line, and the best way to get there is from Anaconda Navigator, then the 'Environments' tab, then click on the triangle beside the base environment, selecting 'Open Terminal': This will update all packages in the current environment to the latest version - with the small print being that it may use an older version of some packages in order to satisfy dependency constraints (often this won't be necessary and when it is necessary the package plan solver will do its best to minimize the impact). (But this should be preceeded by conda update -n base conda so you have the latest conda version installed) In most cases what you want to do when you say that you want to update Anaconda is to execute the command: conda update -all Root is the old (pre-conda 4.4) name for the main environment after conda 4.4, it was renamed to be base.

Update anaconda