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Microsoft starts rolling out Office 2019 for Windows and Mac

Microsoft is starting to roll out Office 2019, its on-premises Office suite for Windows and Mac, and will be delivering the Office 2019 servers within the coming weeks.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

The preview period is over. Microsoft is making Office 2019 generally available starting today, September 24, for Windows and Mac.

Office 2019 is the successor to Office 2016. It's the "perpetual," on-premises version of Microsoft's Office suite and includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Project, Visio, Access and Publisher. Microsoft released a preview of these applications to commercial customers in April 2018.

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As Microsoft officials have said previously, the Office 2019 feature list is a subset of what Office 365 ProPlus subscribers get. The 2019 release adds some of the key Office features that Microsoft already has rolled out to its Office 365 subscribers over the past three years.

The Office 2019 release won't get feature updates; it will get security updates and fixes only.With Office 2019, users will get Morph and Zoom for PowerPoint; new data-analysis features for PowerPivot; Learning Tools like Read Aloud and Text Spacing for Word and Outlook; various security updates across the suite and more.

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Credit: Microsoft

Office 2019 is going out first to volume licensees, starting today. It will be available to other consumer and commercial customers in the next few weeks, officials said. And Project, Visio, Access and Publisher are available for Windows only.

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Microsoft plans to roll out the 2019 releases of its on-premises business servers, including Exchange Server 2019, Skype for Business Server 2019, SharePoint Server 2019 and Project Server 2019 "in the coming weeks."

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Just a reminder: Office 2019 will only run on Windows 10, not Windows 7/8.1 and in the case of the server apps, Windows Server 2019. The Office 2019 client apps also will be released as Click-to-Run only. Microsoft won't be providing a MSI option for Office 2019 clients, but will continue to do so for Office Server products.

Update (September 24): Microsoft officials also confirmed today that there will be another on-premises, perpetual version of both its Office clients and servers after Office 2019. (Before today, all we could get was a "maybe.") Microsoft isn't providing any timing guidelines as to when the successor to Office 2019 client and server will be available, but they are definitely on the roadmap, as a result of customer feedback.

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Microsoft recently relented on some of its previously stated support cut-off dates for Office on various variants of Windows. Office 2016 will continue to work with Office 365 back-end services through October 2023 now. In addition, Microsoft is going to provide five years of mainstream support and approximately two years of extended support so as to align with the extended-support end date for Office 2016 (which is Oct. 14, 2025).

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