Highlights:

  • The company appears to have been planning this transition for some time, having renamed Office 365 subscriptions as Microsoft 365 about two years ago.
  • Microsoft will continue to sell perpetually licensed versions of Office apps such as Word and Excel under the Office 2021 branding.

After more than 30 years, Microsoft Corp is changing the brand name of its suite of productivity tools from Office to Microsoft 365.

The change doesn’t mean applications such as Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will disappear, but they will instead be lumped under the Microsoft 365 umbrella instead of the Office branding.

The Microsoft 365 branding is not entirely new. The company seems to have been planning this change for a while, having renamed Office 365 subscriptions to Microsoft 365 two years back.

Microsoft said the first changes would be seen in November when the online Office apps available through Office.com will switch to the Microsoft 365 branding. Then, in January 2023, the Office app that comes with Windows 10 and 11 will get a new name, and so will the Office apps for iOS and Android mobile devices. As you can see above, the apps will get a new name and logo through an update.

“In the coming months, Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows will become the Microsoft 365 app, with a new icon, a new look, and even more features,” Microsoft explained in an FAQ.

Microsoft 365 will now include multiple products, including Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, Loop, Clipchamp, Stream, and Microsoft’s new Designer app. The central Microsoft 365 app for mobile and desktop will include a feed of relevant meetings and colleagues, a hub for all documents, and custom tagging to better group and organize content.

The Microsoft Office brand won’t completely disappear, however. The company said that Office 365 accounts that are already set up are not being changed yet.

Also, Microsoft will keep selling versions of Office apps like Word and Excel that can be used forever under the Office 2021 brand. In other words, Microsoft Office has become a brand from the past.