What do I do about my Excel and Word apps that are 32-bit when Apple transitions to 64-bit?
What do I do about my Excel and Word apps that are 32-bit when Apple transitions to 64-bit?
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Apple started the 64-bit transition with OS X 10.4 Tiger over a dozen years ago, and was well along and running 64-bit apps with Snow Leopard 10.6 on 64-bit Intel systems. This last stage with Catalina 10.15 is the retirement of the remaining support and the old 32-bit programming interfaces. And the retirement of the old and under-maintained and un-upgraded 32-bit apps.
What to do here? Nothing. If you want. Absolutely nothing. High Sierra 10.13 and Mojave 10.14 aren’t going to stop running 32-bit apps. This in addition to supporting 64-bit apps.
The diagnostics you are seeing are intended to reduce the numbers of folks that immediately upgrade to Catalina 10.15, and that then lose access to their key 32-bit apps.
If and when you do upgrade to Catalina 10.15, you’ll need to upgrade your remaining 32-bit apps to 64-bit apps, or retire and replace those apps and/or migrate that data, or boot and run High Sierra or Mojave as a guest.
As for the path forward here, you are running an old and unsupported version of Microsoft Office—Microsoft Office went 64-bit a while back with the supported releases—which means you’ll have to acquire Office 2016, Office 2019, or Office 365, or you’ll want to migrate to Apple iWork Pages, Numbers and Keynote, or you’ll want to migrate to LibraOffice or OpenOffice. All of which can read and write most Office documents.