This week Microsoft released preview versions of Office 2021 for macOS and Office LTSC (Long-Term Servicing Channel), which targets enterprise customers. As it was announced back in February of this year, both versions of the office suite are local, i.e. do not require a connection to the Microsoft 365 cloud service. They are aimed at users who, for some reason, are not ready to start using the Microsoft cloud platform.

Office 2021 for macOS reportedly supports installation on Macs with Intel chips and Apple’s own M1 processors. To install the office suite, you will need 4 GB of RAM and 10 GB of disk space. It is a local version that is purchased for a one-time fee. In the future, Microsoft will regularly release updates for Office 2021, so users of the on-premises version of the package will be able to receive the latest patches on a par with clients of the Microsoft 365 cloud service.

At the moment, several new features are known, such as Line Focus in Word, which helps to concentrate on working with text, support for dynamic arrays in Excel and the ability to create slideshows with speech in PowerPoint. In general, the local versions of Office are waiting for new features that have recently become available to users of Microsoft 365. Since this week the preliminary versions of the office suite were released, the list of innovations may change by the time the stable versions are officially launched.