Amid speculation that Microsoft was poised to release a new version of Office for the Mac soon came the final word. Yes, there will be a new Mac Office in 2015, with a public beta during the first half of the year and a final version during the second half. Curiously, the next Windows version will probably arrive at roughly the same time. In the past, the other platform received its upgrade first.

Microsoft’s excuse for not releasing a new version of Office for Mac, aside from service packs, since 2010 is the growing emphasis on mobile platforms. They somehow managed to release Office 2013 for the Windows in the interim, though it was a pretty tepid release. It barely supported touch PCs, even on ARM-based Surface tablets.

At the same time, Microsoft is heavily marketing the Office 365 cloud-subscription program, where you pay a monthly or annual fee and can be assured you’ll get all the updates without charge, Mac, Windows, iOS, etc. It’s actually quite a deal if you opt for the Office 365 Home package. It’s $10 a month or $100 per year, and you can install the suite on up to five Macs and/or PCs, and five iPad and/or Windows tables. You also get 1TB One Drive cloud storage per user. That price would be reasonable just for the cloud storage, even if you don’t really care so much about installing Office on more than a single computer.

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This article was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2014 at 12:00 AM and is filed under News and tagged with: iOS, iPad, Mac Office, Macintosh, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, Office For Mac, Office for the Mac, Surface.