Office 2024 & Office LTSC 2024

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote are in every Office 2024 SKU. Publisher and Access are not — Publisher has been retired, and Access is available only through Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise on the subscription side. Teams is also not included; it is a separate Microsoft 365 service and the standalone Teams desktop client must be installed independently. Skype for Business is fully removed. The cloud-connected features that Microsoft 365 users take for granted — Copilot, real-time co-authoring across tenants, OneDrive auto-save defaults, advanced sensitivity labelling — are deliberately absent. This is an offline-first product.

The retail SKUs target consumers and very small businesses. Office Home 2024 is the cheapest tier — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote — and is licensed for personal, non-commercial use on a single PC or Mac. Office Home & Business 2024 adds Outlook and grants commercial use rights. Office Professional 2024 (Windows only) adds Publisher-replacement guidance and is sold through select channels. All retail SKUs are one-time purchases with no Software Assurance, no version upgrade rights, and security updates for five years from general availability — roughly until late 2029. They activate against a Microsoft account; the licence lives in that account and can be re-installed on the same device after a reformat without contacting support.

Office LTSC (Long-Term Servicing Channel) 2024 is the volume-licensed sibling: Office LTSC Standard 2024 and Office LTSC Professional Plus 2024. It is sold exclusively through Volume Licensing and CSP as a perpetual-licence SKU and receives security updates for five years. The deployment story is different from retail: organisations use the Office Deployment Tool with a Configuration.xml file to download and stage a custom image, and activate centrally via Key Management Service (KMS), Active Directory-based Activation or Multiple Activation Keys (MAK). LTSC suits regulated environments — defence, healthcare, industrial control systems, dedicated kiosks, lab machines, and any scenario where Microsoft 365 is forbidden by policy or impractical for connectivity reasons.

Retail Office 2024 is per-device — one purchase, one PC or Mac. Office LTSC 2024 Standard is per-device; Office LTSC Professional Plus is most commonly licensed per device through Volume Licensing but can be acquired per user through certain Microsoft Products and Services Agreement (MPSA) and Enterprise Agreement programmes. The Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise side is always per user. If a small organisation is deciding between buying Office 2024 retail for ten staff and putting them on Microsoft 365 Apps for Business at the same price point, the subscription will deliver Copilot eligibility, multi-device installs per user (5 PCs, 5 tablets, 5 phones), and a continuously updated feature set — almost always the better answer unless an offline / no-cloud constraint applies.

LTSC 2024 and Microsoft 365 Apps cannot be installed side-by-side on the same machine — they share the Click-to-Run engine and conflict on update channels. Pick one or the other per device. Visio, Project and the language packs use the same engine and follow the same rule. LTSC 2024 will not receive Copilot in any form — Copilot is fundamentally a cloud service that depends on Microsoft Graph indexing, and LTSC is intentionally offline. It also will not receive new feature releases — that is the entire point of the channel; only security updates ship for the support window.

Retail Office 2024 activates against a Microsoft account on first launch; if the device falls off the network for long periods, the licence drops to read-only after roughly 30 days until it re-checks in. LTSC 2024 supports three volume activation models: KMS (a single internal Key Management Service host activates clients for 180 days at a time, refreshed automatically), Active Directory-based Activation (no server role; activation rides on the existing AD infrastructure and is the simplest model for domain-joined estates), and MAK (a finite pool of activations baked into a single key, suitable for isolated machines that cannot reach KMS). The Office Customisation Tool produces the Configuration.xml that drives the install — including which apps to include or exclude, which language packs to deploy, and which update channel to honour.

Office 2024 for Mac ships the same Word / Excel / PowerPoint / Outlook / OneNote apps with native Apple Silicon binaries and full feature parity with Windows for everyday use. The mobile Office apps remain free for personal use on devices with a screen smaller than 10.1 inches; larger tablets and any commercial use require a Microsoft 365 subscription, not a perpetual Office 2024 licence. Office 2024 ships in over 30 languages with proofing tools available for many more; LTSC deployments can install multiple display languages from the same Configuration.xml.