WASHINGTON – Tech giant Microsoft has announced its Office 2019 will only run on Windows 10.
Users will need to upgrade to Windows 10 to get the latest version of Office without subscribing to the company’s Office 365 service, the company said in a blog post.
The move is clearly designed to push businesses that are holding off on Office 365 into subscriptions, as the standalone Office 2019 software will only be supported on Windows 10 and not Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 machines.
This won’t affect Office for Mac, which is a separate product with a different release schedule, reports The Verge.
Microsoft is also altering the support lifecycle for Office 2019, so it will receive 5 years of mainstream support and then “approximately 2 years of extended support.”
Office 2019 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook apps, as well as server versions of Skype for Business, Exchange, and SharePoint.
It will feature a slew of improvements, including new inking features such as pressure sensitivity, ink replay, and tilt effects, as well as new formulas and charts in Excel and visual animation features for PowerPoint presentations. There will also be server enhancements that improve IT manageability, voice, usability, and security.
Microsoft is also extending its Windows 10 support for enterprise and education customers running certain versions of the operating system. Windows 10 version 1511, 1607, 1703, and 1709 will all be supported for another six months to help enterprise and education users move to the latest supported versions of Windows 10.
