In preparation for the official release of the Surface Laptop running the new simplified Windows 10 S today, Microsoft has finally made the complete suite of Office apps available on the Windows Store. Redmond has currently only made preview builds of this software package available to everyone, with an official release scheduled in the coming months. You will then be able to purchase and install Microsoft Office via the Windows Store on other devices.
Talking about the release of the Office productivity suite on Windows Store, Microsoft in a statement mentions:
The full suite of Microsoft Office apps in preview are currently available to download today with Office 365 in the Windows Store for Windows 10 S. On Surface Laptop, you can simply open the Start menu and click on any of the Office app icons like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint to launch the download from the Store.
It has further been mentioned that Outlook, Access and Publisher won’t be made available as part of the said releases because the software is not part of the Office 365 Education plan. Other editions of Office 365 will also be supported on Windows 10 S, but the scope has been limited to Office 365 Personal, Home, Education E5, and Education Plus.
The blog post continues to add,
We’re including 1 year of Office 365 Personal on Surface devices running Windows 10 S that ship during the preview period. While Office itself is not in preview, Office is using new install and update processes that are in preview.
This is being done to provide all Windows users (even those running the standard or Insider builds) with the full suite of Microsoft Office productivity apps such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. These are only four apps being made available today, while it has been stated that Microsoft will be porting rest of the Office apps, namely Access, OneNote and Publisher 2016 to the Windows Store with the use of the Desktop Bridge or Centennial tool.
Office for Windows 10 S is going live on June 15 https://t.co/7jbvpdBOaO
— WalkingCat (@h0x0d) June 15, 2017
In addition, Microsoft has taken to its support forum to make Windows users aware of the limitations of the preview versions of its Office apps. It asserts that users will currently only have the option to install 32-bit versions of Office, with no support for COM add-ins. Redmond is not including a native OneNote desktop app int he suite but will make the UWP app available for installation. This development was first spotted by Twitter user WalkingCat.
