Microsoft word on MAC OS Catalina

As noted on the forum, many people have experienced the same issue. If you have a 32 bit Word app installed it can be upgraded for free if it is version 16 or later. If it is not, your Word app will not function, nor will any of your other 32 bit apps. Apple is not going to make the changes to allow them to work. The industry has moved on to 4 bit functions. I would like to offer several important points for you and any of our other viewers concerning the ‘problems’ with Microsoft Office after an OS upgrade to Catalina. To summarize:

·     First, Apple has regularly informed all of us for a couple of years that at some point our old 32 bit programs would no longer work with a future OS upgrade. That has finally occurred as we have been told it would. This appears to be the case with you. The message announcements were received when an older 32 bit program was opened.

·      Any other old 32 bit programs you have installed will also be affected. They also will no longer work.

·      As noted, if a person wishes not to upgrade their Microsoft Office, there are several good alternatives. They are the free LibreOffice and OpenOffice apps. Additionally, your Apple OS provides three free programs which you may use as an alternative to Office, Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

·      Any of these apps can and will open your Office documents. You may also create new documents and save them as Word files, etc. when you need to share files with other people who only have Office installed.

·      You should be aware that using these other apps to open Word documents will result in formatting changes.

·      Using any of these programs does involve a learning curve as they work a bit differently, but all of them are fine programs.

If you have Microsoft Office for Mac 2016 or later, it can be upgraded at no cost. If it is an earlier version, it cannot.

·      If you decide to upgrade an older version of Office, you have options. You may elect to subscribe to any of the following:

• • Office 365 Home:         $99.99 per year or $9.99 monthly. This allows you to install Office in up to six devices. This service must be renewed yearly. You may try the service free for one month.
  • Office Personal:           $69.99 per year or $6.99 monthly. This is for installation on one device only. This service must be renewed yearly. You may try the service free for one month.
  • Office Home & Student:        $149.99 one-time purchase cost. This is a purchasefor installation on one device only and is not renewed or have a monthly fee. It does not expire.
  • The second and third options include fewer additional apps such as having no Outlook email app. Check the Microsoft site for details.

·       I strongly recommend that if you elect to do the Office upgrade, you first completely remove your Old Office app and its associated bits and pieces which will be spread through several other folders. This can be done effectively with the free program AppCleaner.app. It is easy to use and doing so will avoid creating any potential conflicts. After this is done, then you may download the replacement Microsoft Office files safely.

·       Finally, and this is important, when purchasing any of these Office upgrades, you need to register your purchase on the Microsoft web site, including which device or devices the apps are installed on. This can be changed later if a device is replaced. You must do this registration or you can have problems.

In summary, Apple has warned us of the change to 64 bit operations only. It has occurred. Now, it is up to us to decide how to respond. If you elect not spend the money to upgrade Office, the suggested alternatives will work for you, and they are free.

I hope this information is helpful to you.

No, old versions of Word will not run in Catalina.

You have several options, purchase new Word, use Pages instead, or use the free LibreOffice Suite:

https://www.libreoffice.org

I'm sure Apple isn't going to be adjusting anything. They've been warning developers to upgrade to 64-bit for years. It's up to the developers to offer their upgrades as free or paid.

Microsoft only supports Office 365 subscriptions, or the single-purchase, Office 2019 for Mac on Catalina because these suites are 64-bit. Office 2011 was never tested on even High Sierra and was retired in Oct 2017. Office 2008 was retired several years earlier.

If you are not prepared to use (and learn) the free LibreOffice which is a 64-bit MS Office clone, then you will have to spend some money on something. Apple's free Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are not Microsoft clones and will not open your Microsoft documents in their native document format, nor export back to Microsoft document formats with original document accuracy.

There are plenty of alternative word processing applications on the market that cost money, and import Word documents. If you are sharing documents with others that are going to open these documents in MS Office applications, you are far safer sending them documents that originated, or were edited in MS Office (or LibreOffice).

I would like to offer several important points for you and any of our other viewers concerning the ‘problems’ with Microsoft Office after an OS upgrade to Catalina..

·      First, Apple has regularly informed all of us for a couple of years that at some point our old 32 bit programs would no longer work with a future OS upgrade. That has finally occurred as we have been told it would.

·      Any other old 32 bit programs you have installed will also be affected. They will no longer work.

·      As noted, if a person wishes not to upgrade their Microsoft Office, there are several good alternatives. They are, as noted, the free LibreOffice and OpenOffice apps. Additionally, your Apple OS provides three free programs which you may use as an alternative to Office, Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

·      Any of these apps can and will open your Office documents. You may also create new documents and save them as Word files, etc. when you need to share files with other people who only have Office installed.

·      Using any of these programs does involve a learning curve as they work a bit differently, but all of them are fine programs.

If you have Microsoft Office for Mac 2016 or later, it can be upgraded at no cost. If it is an earlier version, it cannot.

·      If you decide to upgrade Office, you have options. You may elect to subscribe to any of the following:

• • Office 365 Home:         $99.99 per year or $9.99 monthly. This allows you to install Office in up to six devices. This service must be renewed yearly. You may try the service free for one month.
  • Office Personal:           $69.99 per year or $6.99 monthly. This is for installation on one device only. This service must be renewed yearly. You may try the service free for one month.
  • Office Home & Student:        $149.99 one-time purchase cost. This is a purchaseis for installation on one device only and is not renewed. It does not expire.
  • The second and third options include fewer additional apps such as Outlook. Check the Microsoft site for details.

·       I strongly recommend that if you elect to do the upgrade, you first completely remove your Old Office app and its associated bits and pieces which will be spread through several other folders. This can be done effectively with the free program AppCleaner.app. It is easy to use and doing so will avoid creating any conflicts. After this is done, then you may download the replacement Microsoft Office files.

·       Finally, and this is important, when purchasing any of these Office upgrades, you need to register your purchase on the Microsoft web site, including which device or devices the apps are installed on. This can be changed later if a device is replaced. You must do this registration or you can have problems.

In summary, Apple has warned us of the change to 64 bit operations only. It has occurred. Now, it is up to us to decide how to respond.

Lastly, some people keep suggesting that Apple benefits from these app upgrades. It is nice to rant, but Apple does not in any benefit from an Office upgrade. That should be clear and easy to understand.

To AngieCango. I appreciate your frustration, but if I may, I suggest that that you will do better to direct your attention to resolving your problem. First, You do not have to buy MS Office if all you use is the Word app. That single app would cost less than purchasing the full Office package. You would have to check the Microsoft site for the cost, I don't have it. Second, we have all been told for years that a future upgrade of the MAC OS was coming which would no longer support the older 32 bit apps. Now it has happened. You were also warned when you began the upgrade process.

The question remaining is how to deal with it. I'm assuming that your version of Office is an older one which can not be upgraded at no cost. (This has been adequately discussed on this forum if you need details.) You may elect to use the less featured version of Word which is FREE and available on the Web. Again, details are available to you on the Microsoft web site.

You also have three more options (which have also been extensively discussed on this forum). You can use Apple's FREE Pages app which you already have installed in your computer. Or you may download and use the FREE Libre Office or Open Office apps. All three alternatives are excellent programs and they can also open Word documents as well as save their documents to a Word format.

I'm sorry to say that no one is going to solve your problem for you. It will be up to you to decide what to do and take the necessary steps. You now have the options available to you.

With all these options, I must ask you, what is the problem?

The answer is the same as throughout the rest of this topic. Office 2004 is 32 bit software and cannot be used in Catalina. You either need to revert to an older OS where it works, or purchase a new version.

If you need to use MS Office in particular, then the two current choices are Office 365 (subscription), or the one-time cost perpetual license Office 2019.

Otherwise, there's the free, open source NeoOffice or OpenOffice. Neither of these has any type of replacement for Outlook (Entourage in Office 2004). They also don't do well translating all Office documents.

If you do upgrade to a new version of Office and need to move your Entourage data forward, it will take some work. The easiest way is to import the data into Outlook 2011. And then import that converted database into Office 365 or 2019. The tedious way is to manually export your contacts to a tab delimited, or Vcard file, and all of your emails dragged out to the desktop as .eml files, which you then manually drag into Outlook 2019/365.

A good question. I tried the Open Office app for a while. It's good, but it does require a little bit of learning. It is a single app which has all three functions, of Office. And as was said, although it can open and save as Microsoft files, there may be some differences. Keep in mind that is true only for Microsoft files and if you are mostly working with files that no one else gets, then no problems. The same applies with Apple's Pages and Numbers. I liked the Apple programs a bit more, but they are not nearly as feature rich as Microsoft's. Either one will serve you well.

Incidentally, the new Microsoft apps are significantly different than what you have. And being tied to the web, it is now much slower to open.

What I finally decided to do was to let my subscription to the web based version of Microsoft Office expire. Then I went ahead and purchased a one time download. (After removing all of the old apps, just to keep everything straight.) I don't need all those updates with new features I won't likely use anyhow. It's sold on the Microsoft site, but you have to look for it. It's the "Students and Family" version. You may be able to purchase it elsewhere for less, but when I tried buying via Costco's site, it didn't work to get the download. Something to keep in mind.

Lastly, there is a FREE version of the apps available on the Microsoft web, but you can not save files to your disk and it has fewer features.

In summary, changing over to another program is viable, but you will have to get used to some differences. I Hope this information is helpful.

I have Microsoft Office for Mac 2016 (version 16.16.15) and have had no problems after updating to Catalina (as far as Office goes). Your version is undoubtedly a 32 bit version and WILL NOT work with Catalina.

Maybe but MS will not put that amount of effort into warning users of 8 year old unsupported products like yours.

If you had Office 2016 or better you would not have had a problem other than seeking the latest update.

You have 3 choices

Revert to Mojave with Time Machine

Buy Office 2019 for $150

Install Libre Office

Versions of Microsoft Office prior to 2016, as well as any other 32-bit software, won't open in Catalina. If desired, switch to a product such as LibreOffice.

(175262)

I didn't even get a warning on my iMac before updating with Catalina. Would have been nice, and no, I would definitely not have installed Catalina if I knew this. I got some article or list of things to look out for and none applied to me, and losing Word was not on the list. Now Word crashes the minute I try to open any of my many Word documents. If I don't shut down Word completely, my computer makes loud noises like they do right before they die. Do not install Catalina if you need Word.

Word in MS Office 2016 is now working just fine on my IMac running Catalina. Here's what it took: I contacted MS Help via chat, as I was preparing to just purchase a newer version of MS Office to solve this problem, and just had some questions about the specifics of the purchase. The help/chat guy said all I needed to do was uninstall, then reinstall, MS Office 2016. I was skeptical, but he walked me through it and... voila! It didn't work. Haha. But then I read the error message log and saw something about WordRake ( a grammar/writing/editing application). I vaguely recalled seeing a post somewhere stating that WordRake caused problems after an update. So I uninstalled WordRake, and now the MS Office 2016 that I reinstalled works just fine for Word. So if you are a WordRake user, find it an uninstall. Not sure if you still need to un- and reinstall MS Office 2016, too.

srad750c wrote:

At least you got warned, I updated the iOS on my mom's iMac and now her $400 MS Office doesn't work cause it's not 64 bit, Apple you dropped the ball on this one. And by the way you can't revert to older software. So now, she has $2000 computer that's useless to her and I'm salty cause it was a gift I gave 3 years ago, bragging this was her last computer. More and more looks like I'm going to have to pull away from Apple.

iOS does not run on a Mac computer. You were warned for over a year before Catalina was released. What version of Office is $400? Revert your Mac to a previous macOS version - Apple Support

Best of luck with your new Windows PC.

Download LibreOffice for free (donations optional)

Don't update it, unfortunately i did and photoshop and Microsoft among other things stoped working and i regret it.