In March, Microsoft officially announced its plans to launch a new stand-alone version of its Office apps under the branding of Office 2024. Today, the company stated that a public preview of Microsoft Office LTSC 2024 for commercial customers is now available.
In a blog post, Microsoft stated that those commercial customers can learn how to install and activate the public preview of Office LTSC 2024 for both Windows and Mac on their respective support pages. The applications that are a 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 past Office releases, Microsoft says Office LTSC 2024 will also have "a subset of new features already available in Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise." The specific new features were not revealed. The apps will be supported for five years with software updates when they officially launch later this year.
Microsoft added:
And because we know that many customers deploy Office LTSC on only a subset of their devices, we will continue to support the deployment of both Office LTSC and Microsoft 365 Apps to different machines within 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 previously said that when the commercial versions of Office 2024 launched, customers would see higher prices, up to 10 percent, for the app collection compared to the previous Office release. Microsoft also confirmed that there will be a consumer version of Office 2024 released this year, but its prices will not be going up.
Earlier this week, Microsoft said that support for Office 2016 and 2019 apps will end on October 14, 2025.