Announced earlier this year, the offline, subscription-free version of Microsoft’s office suite for businesses is here. However, the consumer version will have to wait a little longer.
Microsoft confirmed last March that a version of Office with a perpetual license purchase was planned for 2024. As we explained in detail in this article, this new version of the famous office suite will therefore work offline and without a subscription to the Microsoft 365 formula. It will also integrate some of the new features introduced over the last three years in Microsoft 365, but will ignore the collaborative editing tools and artificial intelligence functions based on Copilot. Despite these regrettable and somewhat arbitrary limitations, Office 2024 will remain an interesting choice for companies needing a stable office suite operating in an environment isolated from the Internet, and for individuals wishing to amortize the cost of acquiring the software over the long term.
After releasing a test preview in April, Microsoft announced last week that the final version of Office 2024 LTSC will soon be available, for Long Term Servicing ChannelThis version, exclusively intended for businesses and professional organizations, will therefore be released on the 1ster October 2024 and should be displayed at a price increase of 10% compared to the 2021 vintage. It should also be noted that, as Microsoft insists, Office 2024 LTSC will be frozen in terms of tools and functions, and will only receive security updates after its release. On the What’s new compared to Office 2021interesting additions but nothing revolutionary: a modernized graphic theme, some accessibility tools, support for the ODF 1.4 format or even the addition of a dozen functions and new dynamic graphics in Excel.
As for the arrival of the version intended for individuals, called Office 2024 Home & Students, no precise release date has unfortunately been communicated. In the last paragraph of the Office 2024 LTSC release note, Microsoft only indicates that information relating to Office 2024 for families and students will be given “in the coming weeks”without further details. If you were waiting for Office 2024 to update the office suite on your family computer, you will therefore have to be a little more patient.
In the meantime, and as always with Microsoft products, it will probably be possible to purchase “used” licenses of Office 2024 LTSC after the 1er October, from gray market resellers specializing in this field. Be careful, however, because while these licenses are attractive due to their low price (a few euros!), they are most often “single-use” and cannot be reused when reinstalling the operating system or purchasing a new computer.