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Microsoft is announcing two new versions of Office today: a consumer version of Office 2021 and Office LTSC for business customers. Office 2021 will be available later this year for Windows and macOS, and similar to the previous version of Office 2019, it’s designed for those who don’t want to subscribe to cloud-based variants of Microsoft 365.
Microsoft doesn’t fully detail all the features and changes for Office 2021 yet, but the Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) variant will include things like dark mode support, accessibility improvements, and features like as Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel. Office 2021 will include similar functionality.
Don’t expect any major UI changes either. Dark Mode is the visually obvious change, but Microsoft will continue to focus most of its interface and cloud functionality on Microsoft 365 versions of Office first.
Office LTSC is Microsoft’s clear recognition that not all of its business customers are ready to move to the cloud. “It’s just about trying to meet customers where they are,” says Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365, in an interview with The edge. “We definitely have a lot of customers who have migrated to the cloud in the last 10 months, it’s really happened en masse. At the same time, we certainly have customers who have specific scenarios where they don’t think they can move to the cloud. “
These specific scenarios include regulated industries where processes and applications cannot change on a monthly basis, or manufacturing plants that depend on Office and want limited time release. Microsoft is also committing to another perpetual version of Office for the future, but it is changing the prices and how these new versions will be supported.
Office LTSC will now only be supported for five years instead of the seven that Microsoft typically provided for Office. Prices for Office Professional Plus, Office Standard, and individual apps also increase by 10% for business customers, with Office 2021 prices for consumers and small businesses remaining the same.
The Office LTSC support schedule aligns more closely with how Windows is supported, and Microsoft is also aligning its release schedules for Office and Windows more closely. The next two versions of Office LTSC and Windows 10 LTSC will be released in the second half of 2021. “They will be closely timed, although we do not have the details of the Windows version yet,” says Spataro. “The idea is to bring them together so that companies can deploy and manage them at a similar type of cadence.”
Microsoft now plans to release a preview of Office LTSC in April, with a full version later this year. The Office 2021 consumer variant will not be available in preview, however. The two new Office variants will also ship with OneNote and will include 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
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