Microsoft Office Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) – for Windows and Mac – is available today for all commercial and government users. But the tech giant also promised one consumer version of Microsoft Office 2021, which will be launched on October 5th.
Microsoft Office 2021: the launch is scheduled for October 5th
Office LTSC is designed for businesses in regulated industries where processes and apps can’t change on a monthly basis, or for manufacturing facilities that rely on Office and want a time-locked release. It won’t come with the AI and cloud-based features found in Microsoft 365, and it won’t get any new features either. And the same goes for the consumer version of Microsoft Office 2021, which will in fact launch without any particular feature updates. In any case, these should be the options presented by the new versions:
- Line Focus, similar to a reading mode designed to reduce distractions and move line by line in Word documents
- XLOOKUP, the feature that helps you find items in a table or range by row in an Excel worksheet
- Support for dynamic arrays
- Dark Mode
For its part, Microsoft still recommends Microsoft 365 for both businesses and consumers, as the company has more than 300 million active subscriptions for its commercial customers. Indeed, recently the tech giant also announced a price increase for Microsoft 365 and Office 365, which should go into effect next March 2022. Beyond this, Microsoft Office 2021 will be launched next. October 5th, the same day as Windows 11. More details will be provided in the future, but we just need to know this for now.