Office 2019 Release Date October 2, 2018

Coming Soon sign

Microsoft Office 2019 release date is Oct. 2, 2018 (perpetual license). This is the license type where you purchase it once, to be installed on just one device and can run it as long as you like.  The other type of license is a subscription from Office 365 where you pay monthly or annually for use of the software. A single user subscription license can be installed on up to 5 PCs or Macs, 5 tablets (Windows, iPad, and Android), and 5 phones, per user.   Office 2016 perpetual licenses are no longer available for sale as of August 30, 2018.

There are a few important points to note about the new Office 2019 release:

  1. Microsoft have increased pricing by 10% from 2016 to 2019 (perpetual licenses only).
  2. Office 2019 will not be compatible with Windows 7 or Windows 8.
  3. Office 2019 will be platform agnostic, meaning it will run on any operating system type, including Windows, Mac, Linux

Microsoft has also announced that perpetual license versions of Office will not be able to connect to Office 365 services once mainstream support has ended.  This means that even though a version is still under extended support (security patches only provided), it will not be able to connect to Office 365.  As for Office 2016 perpetual licenses, this means they will no longer connect to Office 365 after mainstream support ends in October 2020.  Having said this, Office 2013 is currently still supported with full functionality on Office 365, despite mainstream support having ended in April of this year.

One might speculate that Office 2019 may be the last perpetual license version Microsoft releases, pushing all customers to Office 365.

New features coming in the Office 2019 release (perpetual version) are listed below.  Note that those using the Office suite via an Office 365 subscription, will already have most of these features, since these users receive ongoing updates.  Perpetual license users don’t receive major feature updates until they upgrade to a newer version of Office.

Office 2019 Release New Features:

Word

“Get work done easier”

Black theme

Office sounds

Learning tools captions and audio descriptions

Text to speech

Improved inking functionality

Accessibility improvements

Excel

“Perform better data analysis”

Funnel charts and 2D maps

New Excel functions and connectors

Publish Excel to PowerBI

PowerPivot enhancements

PowerQuery enhancements

PowerPoint

“Create more impactful content”

Zoom capabilities for ordering of slides within presentations

Morph transition feature

Insert and manage Icons, SVG, and 3D models

Improved roaming pencil case

Outlook

“Manage email more efficiently”

Updated contact cards

Office 365 Groups*

@mentions

Focused inbox

Travel and delivery summary cards

*Requires Exchange online account

If you would like BSC to review your computer equipment and put a plan in place for replacements and upgrades, contact us today.  We’ll audit what you have and explain your options.