Any Mac Gurus?

[ronk]

When I ditched my PC i bought iMac along with the Office 2011 suite.
Now I'm constantly getting notifications to say the software won't work on the latest operating system - Now there is "Catalina" waiting to be installed.

I don't want to pay a subscription fo Office 365 or spend another (at a guess) £250 for the microsoft package.

Any advice please?

[Overweight Unicorn]

Update to a newer Mac?

[djstan]

What do you need Office for? There are lots of free alternatives in the Mac world, like OpenOffice or the Apple alternatives like Pages.

Personally, I don't mind paying the subscription for O365 - the non-subscription version is £250 (https://products.office.com/en-gb/get-s ... pare_table). What's the objection to subscribing to Office 365?

[ronk]

I’ve already coughed up £250 for the Office suite and don’t want a monthly subscription as I don’t think I would benefit greatly. I don’t use as often other than the odd letter email or spread sheet. Although as you say there are alternatives I’ve been using Excel, Word and Outlook for too many years now.

If my old version would work with Catalina I would be happy with the current level of functionality.

[dr_john]

FWIW I paid around £100 on my Dell PC for a perpetual Office licence, I don’t understand the prices mentioned here.

Is this just Apple?

[obewan]

Ronk, have you any family/friends working in industry etc?
A company I worked for had an agreement with MS that the Office package could be downloaded for free (or £10 for a disc) for home use.
You applied via works email for a code that then let you download it.
You were allowed 3 licenses. I got 1 for my own PC and 2 Apple versions for my sons.
The only catch was that if you left the company you were supposed to delete the package
10 years later it still works fine and I've successfully transferred it when replacing my PC's

[mmm-five]

Update to a newer Mac?

Newer Mac won’t help, and if it’s offering the upgrade to Catalina it must be new enough to run it.

The problem is with older (32-bit) software not working in 10.15 Catalina, due to Apple deprecating support for 32-bit apps. To be fair, they have been warning users & developers of their plans for about 5 years

I’ve got one machine on Catalina, and the other is still on Mojave as there are still some legacy apps that I need.

My solution for now, would be to NOT upgrade to Catalina, and keep using Office 2011 until you’re forced to upgrade. The warnings are just that whilst you stay on Mojave (assuming you are on 10.14 Mojave).

If you must upgrade, then you can buy a single user version (home & student) of Office 2019 for about £120 direct from Microsoft (or I’m sure you can find somewhere that has hooky copies for less). You can also still find Office 2016 if you don’t need the latest version...in fact I might have a 2016 one I don’t use anymore after switching to 365...

[mmm-five]

FWIW I paid around £100 on my Dell PC for a perpetual Office licence, I don’t understand the prices mentioned here.

Is this just Apple?

It’s not Apple...it’s Microsoft not offering the same deals to Mac users.

I use the 5-user annual subscription and pay about £70 a year, but I’m a heavy user for work. It’s a much better deal than the Adobe suite at about £600 a year

I can’t use anything other than Office as whilst the alternatives are good I their own way (and have tried most...NeoOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, iWork, etc.), they are not 100% feature compatible, and sometimes the formatting you’ve painstakingly applied to a 250 page report goes wrong. For simple use where format integrity & sharing are not an issue then they’re more than good enough.

[mmm-five]

Ronk, have you checked what other software you have that is 32-bit, and likely to refuse to run if you upgrade?

You should be able to get a report from ‘About This Mac’, or you can download a free app called Etrecheck to give you lots more info on incompatible apps (and lots of other things).

[Adil_3]

Long story short do the update, ditch the office 365 and use the macs original software. Does the trick learning curve is easy and its so much easier to use in the long run. Only downside is when sharing files export them as word, excel, etc etc.

Numbers = excel
Keynote = powerpoint
Pages = word

[djstan]

I’ve already coughed up £250 for the Office suite and don’t want a monthly subscription as I don’t think I would benefit greatly. I don’t use as often other than the odd letter email or spread sheet. Although as you say there are alternatives I’ve been using Excel, Word and Outlook for too many years now.

If my old version would work with Catalina I would be happy with the current level of functionality.

Although I have a lot of sympathy with this, Office 2011 is really quite old these days...

What about trying to find a more recent copy of Office Mac on eBay? I’m not sure where 64-bit support starts but I’d imagine at least the last 2 versions would be compatible.

[Johnbmwz4]

I got office 365 from EBay for less than £10. You get an access code sent to you to input on the Microsoft link they send you. You need to remove the current version of Microsoft office off you Mac then install the new one. You can also use it on 5 devices. I have it on my Mac and MacBook and I have had not issues with it at all. It even does automatic Microsoft updates too.

[ronk]

I got office 365 from EBay for less than £10. You get an access code sent to you to input on the Microsoft link they send you. You need to remove the current version of Microsoft office off you Mac then install the new one. You can also use it on 5 devices. I have it on my Mac and MacBook and I have had not issues with it at all. It even does automatic Microsoft updates too.

That sounds fine to me - but I apologise now for sounding like a numpty - but how do I keep my current settings etc for my Outlook?