In March, Microsoft officially announced its plans to launch a new standalone version of its Office applications branded as Office 2024. Today, the company announced that a public preview of Microsoft Office LTSC 2024 is now available to commercial customers.
in a blog postMicrosoft stated that those commercial customers can learn how to install and run the Office LTSC 2024 public preview for both Windows and Mac on their support pages. The apps that are part of the preview include:
- Microsoft Office LTSC Professional Plus 2024 (includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and Access)
- Microsoft Office LTSC Standard for Mac 2024 (includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote)
- Microsoft Project Professional 2024
- Microsoft Visio Professional 2024
In addition to features found in previous releases of Office, Microsoft says Office LTSC 2024 will also have “a subset of new features that are already available in Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise.” The specific new features have not been revealed. The apps will be supported for five years with software updates when they are officially launched later this year.
Microsoft added:
And because we know that many customers deploy Office LTSC to only a subset of their devices, we’ll continue to support the deployment of Office LTSC and Microsoft 365 apps to different computers in the same organization using a common set of deployment tools: Click-to-Run on Windows and Apple Package format (pkg ) on Mac, just like Office LTSC 2021.
Microsoft has previously said that when the commercial versions of Office 2024 launch, customers will see higher prices, up to 10 percent, for the collection of apps compared to the previous Office edition. Microsoft also confirmed that a consumer version of Office 2024 will be released this year, but its prices will not increase.
Earlier this week, Microsoft said that support for Office 2016 and 2019 apps will end on October 14, 2025.