Keep up to date with Microsoft Office 2024, the new and latest version of Office. It’s features, price, support and requirements.
Office 2024 is what Microsoft calls a ‘perpetual licence’ version of Office. A single payment for ongoing use of the software with no annual payments (aka ‘subscription). It replaces Office 2021.
Office 2024 was released on 1 October 2024.
Office LTSC 2024 is similar software with some small changes in features for volume licence customers. LTSC = Long-Term Servicing Channel. Office LTSC 2024 is out now for volume licence customers only.
If you have Microsoft 365 – Do NOT buy Office 2024, 2021 or 2019 like Microsoft 365 Family (formerly Home), Microsoft 365 Personal or an enterprise plan. In other words, you pay for Office as an annual fee.
Microsoft much prefers to sell their Microsoft 365 annual payment plans (‘subscriptions’). They overprice and under-resource Office 2019/2021/2024 to encourage a move to their more profitable plans. In other words, Microsoft would prefer not to sell Office perpetual licence products at all.
What’s in Office 2024
Office 2024 includes in all bundles for Windows and Mac these apps. It’s called Office Home 2024.
- Word 2024
- Excel 2024
- PowerPoint 2024
Office Home and Business 2024 also has
- Outlook 2024
OneNote is also mentioned but OneNote is available as a free download for everyone.
Also Visio 2024 and Project 2024 for volume licences.
NO Publisher since that app is being “retired” see , Microsoft Publisher is ending – what you need to know
No Access, the database software.
Which versions of Windows and Mac?
Office 2024 for Windows will only work on Windows 11 and Windows 10 – 32 and 64-bit versions Windows ARM devices need Windows 11.
For Mac computers, Microsoft’s policy is to support the current and previous two releases of macOS. At the moment that means Sequoia (v15 2024), Sonoma (v14 2023) and Ventura (v13 2022). Office 2024 works on both Intel and Apple M1/2/3 based computers.
Features
Office 2024 has a “a subset of the features that have been added” to Microsoft 365 over the last three years.
Some features are known, at least in a general way.
- Outlook: new meeting creation options and search enhancements
- Excel: Dynamic Arrays and Charts
- Word: support for OpenDocument format 1.4
- and Microsoft standard promise of better performance, security, and accessibility.
Office 2024 will have all the features of Office 2021 plus a limited range of extras. As a guide, Office 2021 had only an official short list of seven changes from Office 2019. There were other minor changes but Microsoft only mentioned seven in their promotion.
No Copilot
Paid Copilot plans like Copilot Pro or Copilot for Microsoft 365 can NOT be linked to Office 2024.
But you can use Copilot free services alongside any Office apps, including Office 2024.
Price
Office 2024 for consumers will be the same price as Office 2021.
Office 2024 Home US$149.99 plus taxes
Office 2024 Home and Business US$249.99
In practice you’re paying $100 more to get Outlook 2024 because Onenote is available for free.
Office LTSC 2024 is 10% more expensive than Office LTSC 2021.
Keep in mind that Microsoft much prefers to sell their Microsoft 365 annual payment plans (‘subscriptions’). They overprice and under-resource Office 2019/2021/2024 to encourage a move to their more profitable plans. In other words, Microsoft would prefer not to sell Office perpetual licence products at all.
Support
Office 2024 has only five years of support, perhaps less or other conditions since Microsoft can and does change the support rules at any time.
That means Office 2024 will be support with bug and security fixes until October 2029.
Officially all Microsoft Office products have a ‘fixed’ support lifecycle of ten years. But that policy has been consistently broken for the Office perpetual licence products.
Microsoft can and does change the support limits to suit themselves. With Office 2019, Microsoft changed its own support promise. From 10 October 2023 they stopped supporting connections from Office 2019 to Microsoft’s own cloud services even though support still has another two years to run. See Office 2019 & 2016 lose an important part of their support.
Release Date?
Office 2024 was released on 1 October 2024.
Office LTSC 2024 was made available to volume licence customers on 16 September 2024.
The future …
Microsoft has said they are committed to a future release of perpetual licence Office beyond the upcoming Office 2024.
