Microsoft Corp. today announced that the next major iteration of its Office productivity suite, Office 2021, will become generally available to consumers on Oct. 5.

Also today, the company launched a new version of Office LTSC, a separate edition of the productivity suite that’s aimed at the enterprise.

Microsoft provides multiple ways of accessing Word, Excel and  its other productivity applications. Most customers buy them as part of a Microsoft 365 subscription. Others access the applications as part of Office 2021 and Office LTSC, the products for which the tech giant announced updates today. Office 2021 and Office LTSC don’t require a subscription like Microsoft 365 but are instead available as a onetime purchase.

Office LTSC rolled out this morning with several new features aimed at boosting users’ productivity. Many of the same features are expected to become available in Office 2021 when it releases on Oct. 5.

Office LTSC is aimed at companies whose employees require the ability to access Word, Excel and the other applications in the suite even when they don’t have internet access. The desktop computers used to manage production line operations at a factory, for example, are not always connected to a network. 

Another key selling point of Office LTSC is that the suite receives cybersecurity patches but no feature updates. Certain enterprise devices are configured in a way that downloading feature updates to an already installed application is impractical. In Office LTSC, the initial set of capabilities that companies buy with their software purchase remains unchanged.

The refreshed version that Microsoft rolled out today introduces performance and accessibility improvements. There’s also a new dark mode, as well as enhanced productivity features rolling out for Word and Excel.

The Office LTSC version of Word is receiving a feature called Line Focus that allows users to highlight a few lines in a document and temporarily hide the remaining text. The feature is aimed at making it easier to focus on a specific snippet of text.

In Excel, users will have access to two new capabilities designed to make it easier to work with data. 

The first is a feature called XLOOKUP that makes it easier to find specific pieces of data in large spreadsheets.  XLOOKUP allows users to narrow down search results so that a query will only return matching items from a specific row instead of the entire spreadsheet. Reducing the number of items that appear in search results makes it easier for business workers to spot the specific data point they were seeking.

Another new addition is dynamic array support. Excel makes it possible to perform calculations on the data in a spreadsheet and, often, calculations return multiple results. Previously, all the results from a calculation were organized in a single spreadsheet cell, which made accessing them difficult. The dynamic array support enables Excel to organize each calculation result in a separate spreadsheet cell to improve usability.

Many of the new features in Office LTSC are also expected to ship with Office 2021 when it launches next month. The key difference between the two suites is that Office 2021 is aimed at consumers rather than the enterprise market.

Microsoft has stated that it will roll out at least one more new release of Office LTSC in the future. However, the company is actively encouraging users to switch to the subscription-based cloud version of the productivity suite. To boost adoption, the company recently introduced extended offline support that allows users to access the subscription-based version more easily when there’s no internet access. 

Photo: Microsoft