When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Office Universal Apps will require Office 365 for PCs, desktop and mobile names also clarified

Earlier today, we reported that Microsoft had removed the 'beta/preview' tag from its Office Universal Apps - more details on the naming below - and, now the company has provided more details on the future of its touch-centric productivity suite.

Starting off, Microsoft has once again repeated the fact that editing on PCs and large tablets - except when using OneNote - still requires an Office 365 subscription, while the functionality is free for smaller tablets and phones:

Similar to what we announced in March, viewing and most editing will remain free for non-commercial use on devices of 10.1” or less. Otherwise, you will need a qualifying Office 365 subscription. If you don’t have an Office 365 subscription, you can sign up for a free trial at www.office.com/try. You can also always edit your documents for free in Office Online at www.office.com. The full featured OneNote Universal App will come installed with Windows 10 and similar to OneNote on all other devices, editing is free.

Microsoft has also clarified how it will name the apps. The Word, Excel and Powerpoint apps for the desktop Store will be referred to as Office Mobile and have an extra 'Mobile' in their name to distinguish them from the desktop, x86 version of Office. On the mobile side, they are simply called Word, Excel and Powerpoint. While their names are slightly different, these are still Universal Apps and only the name differs between the two stores.

The 'Preview' qualifier will also be dropped, though it might take a week before you see that in the Store. This is also when the Office 365 restriction for PCs and large tablets will kick in.

Source: Microsoft

Report a problem with article
Next Article

Gallery: Windows 10 build 10240, the watermark has evaporated

Previous Article

Windows RT update 3 is coming in September

Join the conversation!

Login or Sign Up to read and post a comment.

40 Comments - Add comment