As promised, Microsoft has brought its Office suite of applications to the Windows Store. You can now get the full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and other applications through Microsoft’s app store… but there’s one small catch.

Right now you can only do that if you have a Surface Laptop running Windows 10 S. Eventually Microsoft will let anyone running Windows 10 download Office from the Windows Store. But today is not that day.

That’s because Office in the Windows Store is still technically a preview. Microsoft says the software itself isn’t a preview, but the install and update process is.

But the company pretty much had to have something ready to go by today, because it would have been silly to start shipping the Surface Laptop and showing off Windows 10 S without allowing customers to run some of the company’s most widely used software.

The good news is that Surface Laptop users who give Office a try while it’s in preview get a free 1-year subscription to Office 365 Personal, which includes access to the full suite of apps plus 1TB of cloud storage with OneDrive.

The less good is that Office in the Windows Store is missing a few features that you’d normally get from the desktop version. Only 32-bit versions of Office are available. Users can’t install any COM add-ins. And you get the OneNote for Window 10 app instead of OneNote 2016.

Right now only Office 365 plans are supported, but after the preview period ends you’ll have the option of buying Office Home & Student 2016 or Office Home & Business 2016 if you’d prefer to pay once for the software rather than signing up for a monthly subscription service.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

4 replies on “Microsoft Office is now available from the Windows Store (for Surface Laptop users)”

  1. This is the second time you’ve used that image. What notebook is that? It’s got some weird aspect ratio and a non-existant bottom bezel.

Comments are closed.