What to know

  • Microsoft will release Office 2024 later this year, a standalone alternative to Microsoft 365 that offers the classic Office apps – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
  • Office 2024 follows in the footsteps of Microsoft Office Home & Student 2021 and will offer five years of support as per its traditional ‘one-time-purchase’ model. 
  • A commercial preview of Office 2024 will be released next month. 

A Microsoft 365 subscription lets you access the suite of office apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, etc. on multiple devices. But there’s also a non-subscription version for users who do not want the additional feature and merely want to run the classic Office apps – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – on a single device. This is possible via Microsoft Office Home & Student 2021. But Microsoft will soon release Office 2024, an updated on-premise suite of apps that will be available as a one-time purchase. 

Office 2024 will be the new LTSC version, following Office 2021

In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the preview of Microsoft’s Office 2024 Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC): “The commercial preview of the next Office LTSC release – Office LTSC 2024 – will begin next month, with general availability to follow later this year.”

Office 2024 is an updated version of its device-based Office 2021 offering and will continue to remain a “perpetual” license bought as a one-time purchase. As such, it will include most of the feature updates that have been introduced to the three classic Office apps since 2021. The license will be supported for five years and will continue to receive additional updates during this time. 

Although additional details concerning the updates will be announced closer to general availability, Office 2024 will not see a price change for the products at the time of release. 

The blog post also mentioned that this won’t be the last standalone Office and Microsoft is committed “to another release in the future”. And since many OEMs bundle Office Home & Student 2021 with device purchases, it’s also possible that they will start including Office 2024 instead once it is released.