New Standalone Version of Microsoft Office Coming in 2018

This week at its Ignite business conference, Microsoft announced the non-subscription version of Office will be receiving an upgrade later in 2018, called Office 2019. Microsoft released the last perpetual version of the productivity suite in fall 2016, which has become quite dated considering the numerous improvements added to Office 365 since. The new version of Office, which includes Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint, will also be accompanied by new on-premise versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business. In a blog post, Microsoft mentioned some of the features coming in Office 2019 next year:

If you are already running Office 365, you already have access to these features. It wouldn’t be surprising if Office 2019 will be just as outdated as 2016 by the time it is released because of a frozen feature set. That said, Office perpetual releases still remain an important option for organizations that like predictability and the ability to deploy new features and technology at their own pace. Managed environments simply don’t like adding stuff that can break or cause compatibility issues. New features coming to Office 365 have been so rapid, Microsoft had to create an Update History page just for the suite. Microsoft is expected to provide more details in the coming months. Are you still a perpetual Office user, if so, which versions are you still using? Hearing that MS Office 2019 is coming doesn’t make my heart sing but I hold out hope that it will function better than 2016. I have had to reinstall it every couple of months because various features in the suite simply stop functioning. Insult to injury comes when the MS support staff warn you that you will need to shell out another $149 to $200 bucks to resolve the issues in Outlook. I refuse to subscribe to any software other than antivirus or external backup. I have 2 T of storage on my computer so I don’t need the cloud. I just hope that Office 2019 is stable! That will be enough for me. Comment

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