Microsoft officially announced Office 2013 in July 2012 and also let anyone download a free preview version of the productivity software suite. Now that the final RTM version of Office 2013 is now on sale, the preview version that was likely installed on millions of PCs is coming to a point where their usefulness will be extremely limited.
As we previously reported, Microsoft stated that the preview version of Office 2013 would only work in a "read only" mode 60 days after the launch of the final version of the product. That means while you can read Office documents with the preview version, it will no longer be able to create new documents or edit previously created ones.
Our own preview version of Office 2013 indicates that it will expire on Wednesday, and our check of our Microsoft Account information shows that the subscription to the preview version ends after today. However, since Office 2013 launched on January 29th, the stated expiration date would seem to be on March 30th, which would also mean that the dates we are seeing are just a few days too early.
We emailed Microsoft and got this message from a spokesperson:
If you have installed or signed up for one of the Office 365 Preview plans, the Preview will expire approximately 30-60 days following general availability in a customer’s market.
So in other words, your mileage may vary depending on when and where you downloaded the preview version.