Microsoft at last ships subscription-free Office 2024 product

Microsoft has at last introduced a standalone, subscription-free version of Office for Mac and PC users, a welcome move to those of us forced into an annual fee by the company’s monolithic command of the productivity software market.

Pay once, use for ages

Office 2024 lets you pay once to get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook. (I think most of us just use the first three applications, but there it is).

The only snag with these releases is that they are ‘locked-in-time’, which means they won’t receive any future feature upgrades. It is to be hoped that security will be maintained.

There’s not too much to say that isn’t known about these apps. We all know that the latest versions are faster and more capable of handling larger documents. Mac users can now customize swipe left and swipe right gestures in Outlook for Mac with a multi-touch trackpad or magic mouse. And if you use PowerPoint you can seamlessly embed a live camera feed directly into your slides with cameo, or record your narration, animations, transitions, and inking with recording studio

Excel delivers access to new functions to help you more easily use text and arrays in worksheets, and more powerful dataset visualizations in charts.

Office 2024 comes in two editions. Office Home 2024 costs $149.99 and includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for one PC or Mac. O

ffice Home & Business 2024 is $249.99 and comes with everything in Office Home 2024 plus Outlook and the rights to use the apps for commercial purposes. (So, if you plan to make a living using Word you’re supposed to give Microsoft another hundred bucks. Nice. For Microsoft.)

Gripes aside, a lot of people will be happy to stop paying another subscription just so their less tech-savvy mates can open their documents without too much thought. The software runs on the three most recent macOS versions and also Windows 10 and 11.

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