“We certainly have a lot of customers that have moved to the cloud over the last 10 months, that’s happened en masse really. “It’s just a matter of trying to meet customers where they are,” explains Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365, in an interview with The Verge. Office LTSC is a clear recognition from Microsoft that not all of its business customers are ready to move to the cloud, though. Dark mode is the obvious change visually, but Microsoft will still focus most of its interface and cloud-powered features on the Microsoft 365 versions of Office first. Office 2021 will include similar features.ĭon’t expect any major UI changes here, either. Microsoft isn’t fully detailing all of the features and changes in Office 2021 just yet, but the Office LTSC (Long-Term Servicing Channel) variant will include things like dark mode support, accessibility improvements, and features like Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel. Office 2021 will be available later this year for both Windows and macOS, and similar to the previous Office 2019 release, it’s designed for those who don’t want to subscribe to the cloud-powered Microsoft 365 variants.
Microsoft is announcing two new versions of Office today: a consumer Office 2021 version and Office LTSC for commercial customers.