What this means for you: It’s no secret that Microsoft would like you to view Microsoft Office as a utility bill–a necessity that you need to budget and pay for, year after year. “Office 2019 will be a valuable upgrade for customers who feel that they need to keep some or all of their apps and servers on-premises, and we look forward to sharing more details about the release in the coming months,” Jared Spataro, the general manager of Office, wrote in a blog post that was released during Microsoft Ignite, the company’s conference for business professionals in Orlando, Florida. Microsoft said, however, that the company realizes that not every customer wants to move to the cloud.

That’s important, as users who don’t have a valid Office license installed on a device can only view, not edit, documents. Office 2019 can be installed only on a single PC. Microsoft provides another advantage to Office 365 subscribers: Even if a customer buys a $70 Personal subscription, that license is technically available to more than one device: one PC, one tablet, and one phone. After some future cut-off date, Microsoft will stop adding features. Office 2019 will add these new features-including improved inking, data analysis for Excel, Morph and Zoom transitions for PowerPoint, and more-but they’ll be more like a snapshot in time. But Microsoft periodically adds new features to the versions of the Office apps that ship with Office 365. Basic functions like spell-checking don’t change much from year to year. Owning a perpetual license to, say, Word, is enough for some. With Office 365, you’ll pay more, but the payment will be spread out over a longer period of time: Microsoft’s Office 365 Home costs $100 per year, for example. (Microsoft did not announce a price for Office 2019, though Amazon sells a single copy of Microsoft Home & Business for $210.) Microsoft would prefer customers to sign up for Office 365 instead, however, which encourages customers to pay for Office on a monthly or annual basis, with new features and patches arriving regularly. Microsoft calls Office 2019 a suite of “perpetual” apps, because customers will pay for them with a one-time fee, rather than a recurring subscription.

Office 2019 lifetime price