Microsoft officially unveiled two new versions of Office this year: Office 2021 for personal users and Office LTSC (Long Term Servicing Channel) for commercial purposes. Office 2021 is an update of Office 2019 and is available once without the need for a Microsoft 365 subscription. Microsoft does not plan to increase costs, which means you can expect prices to be similar to Office 2019.
As for Office LTSC, a commercial preview will be available in April. Although the company has not confirmed any applicable features of Office 2021, we know that Office LTSC will receive support for at least five years. The new LTSC version is expected to offer accessibility enhancements, a new dark mode, Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel, as well as other minor changes to all popular programs including Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. These features are also expected to be adopted by Office 2021. Microsoft has promised to share more details about the new features closer to the launch date, which would be in the second half of 2021.
The announcement of the new version of Office indicates that Microsoft is not just focusing on Microsoft 365, its cloud-based offering. This makes sense because many businesses do not have the means to go completely to the cloud. Jared Spataro, CEO of Microsoft 365, in an interview with The edge, ‘It’s just a problem trying to meet customers where they are. There are definitely a lot of customers who have moved to the cloud in the last ten months. It really happened a lot. At the same time, we definitely have customers who have specific scenarios where they do not feel they can move to the cloud. ”
Microsoft recently released its all-in-one Office app for the iPad, which gives users access to the company’s range of productivity software on the tablet. The new app combines all of Microsoft’s popular office applications, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint, into a single application. This is great, especially for students and businesses. This makes it easier to access all the productivity tools, including making PDFs easy, signing documents and more.