2 weeks Ago By Paul Thurrott
Microsoft announced that Office Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 2024 is now generally available for business and government customers. Versions for consumers will arrive “in the coming weeks” “Office LTSC 2024 offers a locked-in-time version of familiar productivity tools, updated with a subset of the features that have been added to Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise over the last three years,” . “New features for this release include Dynamic Charts and more than a dozen new text and array functions in Excel, enhanced search and meeting creation options in Outlook, and improvements to performance, security, and accessibility.
” Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift! Microsoft Office LTSC 2024 is designed as an alternative to more traditional Microsoft 365 offerings for commercial customers with PCs that are never connected to the Internet or need to remain unchanged for years at a time. Its feature set is locked in, and the product will be supported for five years, during which it can be deployed alongside the Microsoft 365 desktop apps in hybrid managed environments.
The new features won’t seem all that new if you’ve kept pace with Microsoft 365, but they include the new default Office theme first created for Windows 11, OpenDocument 1.4 support, improved accessibility tools, the ability to “Like” comments and replies in collaborative documents, Dynamic array support in charts in Excel, Cameo and presentation recording support in PowerPoint, improved email, calendar, and contact search in Outlook, and more. .
Of course, the big news here isn’t what’s included, but rather what’s not included. Office LTSC 2024 can only be installed on a single PC or Mac, it doesn’t provide access to certain apps (Publisher, Sway, Forms), and doesn’t give customers full access to the Office web and mobile apps. There’s no OneDrive cloud storage included, and there are no feature updates, just security updates.
And you can’t use Office LTSC 2024 with Copilot for Microsoft 365. Office LTSC 2024 is available in , Office LTSC Standard 2024, Office LTSC Professional Plus 2024, and Office LTSC Standard for Mac 2024. .
Paul Thurrott is an award-winning technology journalist and blogger with 30 years of industry experience and the author of 30 books. He is the owner of and the host of three tech podcasts: with Leo Laporte and Richard Campbell, , and with Brad Sams. He was formerly the senior technology analyst at Windows IT Pro and the creator of the SuperSite for Windows from 1999 to 2014 and the Major Domo of Thurrott.
com while at BWW Media Group from 2015 to 2023. You can reach Paul via , or . Join the crowd where the love of tech is real - become a Thurrott Premium Member today! Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday.
