The headline is misleading. Microsoft is suspending development of the UWP Office applications, which happen to be touch-friendly. However, the headline impli

The headline is misleading. Microsoft is suspending development of the UWP Office applications, which happen to be touch-friendly. However, the headline implies that the remaining Win32 versions do not have a touch-friendly mode, which is false. The Win32 versions can be switched between "mouse" and "touch" modes. In touch mode, the pointing targets are all much larger. But as with most user interfaces on modern Windows, even in mouse mode, the Office user interface can be used by touch. Running in mouse mode doesn't remove the helpful pop-up action bar when you've selected text, for example, it just makes the UI elements render more tightly. For the several years I've used a Surface device with a touch screen, I've never used the UWP versions of the Office applications because they never reached feature parity with the Win32 versions. The UWP versions had a subset of functionality; not the same subset but similar in limitations to the web versions. But that doesn't mean I don't use a touch-friendly application suite—I simply use the Win32 versions in both mouse and touch modes.