Microsoft has officially released Office 2019 for Windows and Mac today. It largely includes features that the company has added to its Office 365 service over the past few years. Office 2019 is thus geared towards those individual and business customers who have yet to subscribe to Office 365. It brings updates for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Project, Publisher, Access, and Visio.
Microsoft is making Office 2019 available to commercial volume license customers starting today. It will be made available for other business customers and individual customers in the coming weeks.
The company points out that Office 2019 is a one-time release and that it won’t receive future feature updates. Redmond wants customers to subscribe to Office 365 instead but until all customers do that, it’s bridging the gap with this release. It mentions that new features will continue to arrive for Office 365 ProPlus monthly.
There are improved inking features across Office 2019 in Windows such as the roaming pencil case, pressure sensitivity, and tilt effects. There are Learning Tools like Read Aloud and Text Spacing to make it easier for users to engage with their content.
Even though Microsoft has said that Office 2019 won’t get any feature updates in the future, the company does say that it’s committed to another “on-premises release” in the future. This means that another Office suite will be released in a few years even though Microsoft will continue to prefer its cloud-based Office 365 service more.