Today, Microsoft announced that a preview of Office 2019 is now available for commercial customers. Announced at Ignite last year, Office 2019 is the next perpetual licensed Office product, and it mainly contains new features that Office 365 subscribers are already seeing.
Today"s preview includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Access, Project, Visio, and OneNote for Windows 10. In the coming months, there will also be an Office 2019 for Mac preview, which will also be exclusive to commercial users, along with Exchange 2019, SharePoint 2019, Project Server 2019, and Skype for Business 2019.
As was announced back in February, Office 2019 will only work on Windows 10, and as a Click-to-Run installer. Rather than using a big MSI with all of the software, Click-to-Run downloads the package from the web. But while Office 2019 is for Windows 10 only, Microsoft was quick to note that Office 365 will continue to be supported on Windows 7 and 8.1 for as long as those operating systems are supported.
With Office 2019 coming in the second half of the year, Microsoft wouldn"t confirm that this is the last perpetual version of the productivity suite, saying, "As standard practice, Microsoft will continue evaluating customer needs and industry trends to determine a plan for future versions of our products and services."
If you want to check out the Office 2019 preview, you can sign up here.