Microsoft releases Office 2024, the latest buy-once-own-forever version of Office

Oct. 2, 2024 - Ars Technica

This week the company has officially launched Microsoft Office 2024, a new "locked-in-time" update to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other apps for people who don't want the continuously developed Microsoft 365 versions. For end users, Office Home 2024 gets you Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for $149.

99. Office Home & Business 2024 costs $249.

99, which adds Outlook "and the rights to use the apps for commercial purposes." New Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) products are also being released for businesses and other organizations; Office LTSC Professional Plus 2024 for Windows also includes the Access database management app.

Unlike the Microsoft 365 versions, the perpetually licensed versions of the apps won't get ongoing feature updates, they're missing some real-time collaboration capabilities, and they also won't get any features related to the Copilot AI assistant...