Going down the IT rabbit hole

Microsoft Office LTSC 2024 is now generally available and in a few days most customers will also be able to download it from the usual places. As it was with the last version, Office LTSC 2024 will be supported for five years .

If we want to compare Office LTSC to subscription version of Office products in detail, we can look at the official GA announcement or we can go to the desktop productivity suites comparison page. In short, Office LTSC release does not include any of the cloud-based capabilities of Microsoft 365 Apps (real-time collaboration, AI-driven automation, Copilot,…) and works fully offline (including product licensing&activation that is only device-based).

We have two Windows-based LTSC versions: Standard and Professional Plus. Office LTSC Standard 2024 comes with classic versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook installed on one PC. Office LTSC Professional Plus 2024 includes everything in Office LTSC Standard 2024, plus Microsoft Access. As it has been for a while now we also have Office LTSC Standard for Mac 2024 (classic versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook installed on one Mac).

“Office LTSC 2024 offers a locked-in-time version of familiar productivity tools, updated with a subset of the features that have been added to Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise over the last three years. New features for this release include Dynamic Charts and more than a dozen new text and array functions in Excel, enhanced search and meeting creation options in Outlook, and improvements to performance, security, and accessibility.” (source) (more info: What’s new in Office 2024 and Office LTSC 2024)

Office LTSC 2024 Preview activation keys will expire on January 13th 2025. After that all the apps go in reduced functionality mode, where we can only view and print our documents. If we were testing Office LTSC 2024 Preview, we can update it without uninstalling the preview version. All we need to do is activate the preview installation with our volume license key. How to:

• Key Management Service (KMS) for Office (the same for Active Directory-based activation) on Windows or
• Multiple Activation Key (MAK) for Office on Windows.

This update process also applies to updating Project Professional 2024 Preview to Project Professional 2024, and/or Visio Professional 2024 Preview to Visio LTSC Professional 2024.

Sources we can use, to deploy and/or customize Office applications:

• Office LTSC 2024 deployment documentation
  • Deploy Office LTSC 2024
• Office Deployment Tool – ODT (How to)
  • Configuration options
  • Supported Product IDs
  • Update channel for Office LTSC 2024: PerpetualVL2024
  • Office Customization Tool
  • New product IDs: Access2024Retail, Access2024Volume, Excel2024Retail, Excel2024Volume, HomeBusiness2024Retail, Home2024Retail, OneNote2024Retail, Outlook2024Retail, Outlook2024Volume, Personal2024Retail, PowerPoint2024Retail, PowerPoint2024Volume, Professional2024Retail, ProjectPro2024Retail, ProjectPro2024Volume, ProjectStd2024Retail, ProjectStd2024Volume, ProPlus2024Retail, ProPlus2024Volume, Publisher2024Retail, Publisher2024Volume, Standard2024Retail, Standard2024Volume, VisioPro2024Retail, VisioPro2024Volume, VisioStd2024Retail, VisioStd2024Volume, Word2024Retail, Word2024Volume
• Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) for Microsoft Office
• Microsoft 365 Apps Deployment Log Collector
• How to enable Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise logging
  • Troubleshoot sign-in or activation issues
  • Troubleshoot installation or patching issues
  • Troubleshoot issues with the Serviceability Manager
• Office IT Pro Deployment Scripts
• Office Tool Plus (GitHub) – easy to use GUI for advanced ODT configurations
• GVLKs for KMS and Active Directory-based activation of Office, Project, and Visio