Today, we are announcing the general availability of Office 2019 for Windows and Mac. Office 2019 is the next on-premises version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Project, Visio, Access, and Publisher.*

Office 365 ProPlus, the cloud-connected version of Office, delivers the most productive and most secure Office experience—with the lowest total cost of ownership for deployment and management. However, for customers who aren’t ready for the cloud, Office 2019 provides new features and updates to the on-premises apps for both users and IT professionals. Like Windows Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) releases, Office 2019 provides a set of valuable enhancements for customers who can’t be cloud-connected or receive regular updates.

The new enhancements in Office 2019 are a subset of a long list of features that have been added to Office 365 ProPlus over the last three years. Office 2019 is a one-time release and won’t receive future feature updates. However, we’ll continue to add new features to Office 365 ProPlus monthly, including innovations in collaboration, artificial intelligence (AI), security, and more.

Office 2019 delivers features across apps to help users create amazing content in less time. In PowerPoint 2019, you can create cinematic presentations with new features like Morph and Zoom. And improved inking features across the apps in Windows—like the roaming pencil case, pressure sensitivity, and tilt effects—allow you to naturally create documents.

Excel 2019 adds powerful new data analysis features, including new formulas and charts and enhancements to PowerPivot.

Word 2019 and Outlook 2019 help you focus on what matters most. Learning Tools, like Read Aloud and Text Spacing, make it easier to engage with your content. Focus Mode blocks out distractions and puts your content front and center. And Focused Inbox moves less important emails out of the way—so you can get straight to taking care of business. For a longer list of the new features in Office 2019, see our FAQs.

Office 2019 also includes new IT value for enhanced security and streamlined administration. We introduced Click-to-Run (C2R), a modern deployment technology, in Office 2013, and it’s now used to deploy and update Office across hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. With Office 2019, we’re moving the on-premises versions of Office to C2R to reduce costs and improve security. The advantages of C2R include predictable monthly security updates, up-to-date apps on installation, reduced network consumption through Windows 10 download optimization technology, and an easy upgrade path to Office 365 ProPlus. C2R offers the same enterprise-focused management capabilities as Microsoft Installer (MSI) based products and will also support an in-place upgrade when you move to Office 2019 from older MSI-based products. To learn more, refer to the Office 2019 Click-to-Run FAQ.

The 2019 release of Office products also includes updates to our servers, and in the coming weeks, we will release Exchange Server 2019, Skype for Business Server 2019, SharePoint Server 2019, and Project Server 2019.

Office 2019 is a valuable update for customers who aren’t yet ready for the cloud. And each time we release a new on-premises version of Office, customers ask us if this will be our last. We’re pleased to confirm that we’re committed to another on-premises release in the future. While the cloud offers real benefits in productivity, security, and total cost of ownership, we recognize that each customer is at a different point in their adoption of cloud services. We see the on-premises version of Office as an important part of our commitment to give customers the flexibility they need to move to the cloud at their own pace.

Availability

• Commercial volume license (trusted) customers can access Office 2019 starting today.
• Office 2019 will be available to all customers, consumer and commercial, in the next few weeks.

*Project 2019, Visio 2019, Access 2019, and Publisher 2019 are available for Windows only. Office 2019 customers will have access to OneNote. For more details, see Frequently asked questions about OneNote in Office 2019.

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Source: Office Blog
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