why am I being charged a yearly fee for Microsoft 365 Catalina update rather than buy it in an Apple store?

Sorry. I paid a one time fee. The subscription request and upgrade request came only after upgrading to Catalina which until proven otherwise I consider a total disaster and downgrade.

Nope. Never saw that. Ever.

Hmmmm. Don't know as my computer was "rebuilt" and upgraded about a month ago and thought Mojave was on it. I think this issue has been discussed enough. I would rather have Apple Photos fixed.

My excel and word was working fine. Update my computer to 10.15.1 and boom have to renew my subscription with microsoft. My previous subscription couldn't be found.

riverlady wrote:

Oh really??! Yes. You are correct. I can go back to Mojave. I do not have the skills, time or access to the proper accessories needed to do this after reading how to do it. Believe me, if I could I would go back! You are assuming we are tech nerds and we are not! We are used to using Apple products that work intuitively and well and this Catalina is a Catastrophe!

Office for Mac running macOS Catalina

If you have Office 2011 for Mac or before WILL NOT run.

Office 2016 for Mac needs to be v15.35 or later.

Update the software or try an alternative for word documents—

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-office-for-mac

The current Office for Mac; Office 365 or Office 2019 are OK with Catalina

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-do-i-upgrade-office-ee68f6cf-422f-464a-82ec-385f65391350

https://products.office.com/en-us/compare-all-microsoft-office-products?&activetab=tab:primaryr1

Alternatives:

Pages.app built into the macOS https://support.apple.com/pages

LibreOffice shareware/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/

Take it up with Microsoft, it has nothing to do with your upgrading to Catalina. If you bought their annual subscription, you won't be able to cancel it if you paid for the year in advance, but you don't have to renew when the year is up. Or, you could buy the single license, but you can't buy the individual apps as previously stated.

But, the entire issue is a Microsoft one, has nothing to do with Apple.

riverlady wrote:

I did not know that nor was there a warning. Word and Excel have worked perfectly for me until Catalina. I am a simple user that expects things to work. Not a nerd nor a techie. I am not an office just an occasional user. No more.

You may be a "simple" user, but you are still responsible for the software you use on your computer. Every software use agreement includes those terms; therefore you are responsible to check to see which software will or will not be compatible with an OS upgrade. And, it is only logical that old apps may need an update to continue to work with newer OS iterations.

You should also seriously consider maintaining backups. As an FYI, every hard drive ever made will fail at some point - if you do not have a backup, you will lose absolutely everything on your disk. It is easy to do.

The only way you wouldn't have seen this message at least once is if you upgraded to Catalina directly from Sierra or older.