Microsoft is announcing two new versions of Office today: a version of Office 2021 for the consumer and Office LTSC for commercial customers. Office 2021 will be available later this year for Windows and macOS and, similar to the previous Office 2019 release, it was designed for those who do not wish to subscribe to Microsoft 365 variants in the cloud.
Microsoft has yet to fully detail all the features and changes in Office 2021, but the Office LTSC (Long Term Maintenance Channel) variant will include items such as dark mode support, accessibility improvements and features like Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel. Office 2021 will include similar features.
Don’t expect any major changes to the user interface here. Dark mode is the visually obvious change, but Microsoft will still focus most of its interface and cloud capabilities on Microsoft 365 versions of Office first.
Office LTSC is a clear recognition by Microsoft that not all of its business customers are ready to move to the cloud. “It’s just a matter of trying to serve customers where they are,” explains Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365, in an interview with The Verge. “We certainly have a lot of customers who have moved to the cloud in the past 10 months, which really happened en masse. At the same time, we definitely have customers who have specific scenarios where they don’t feel they can move to the cloud. “
These specific scenarios include regulated sectors where processes and applications cannot be changed on a monthly basis or factories that rely on Office and want a limited release. Microsoft is also committing itself to another perpetual version of Office for the future, but it is changing prices and how these new versions will be supported.
Office LTSC will now be supported for only five years, instead of the seven that Microsoft typically provides for Office. Prices for Office Professional Plus, Office Standard and individual applications are also increasing 10 percent for commercial customers, with Office 2021 prices for consumers and small businesses remaining the same.
Office LTSC support time aligns more closely with the way Windows is supported, and Microsoft is also aligning its release schedules for Office and Windows as a result. Both the next versions of Office LTSC and Windows 10 LTSC will be launched in the second half of 2021. “They will be closely timed, although we do not yet have the details for the launch of Windows,” says Spataro. “The idea is to bring them together so that companies can implement and manage them in a similar type of cadence.”
Microsoft is now planning to release a preview of Office LTSC in April, with a full release later this year. The consumer variant of Office 2021 will not be available in the previous version, however. Both new Office variants will also ship with OneNote and will include 32- and 64-bit versions.