Microsoft word not working on Catalina os

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 (One-time purchase) 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/

Microsoft Office works just fine on macOS Catalina, which implies you’re one of many folks reporting this same problem here that had never upgraded to Microsoft Office 2016, Office 2019, of Office 365, or that hadn’t patched Office 2016.

These three Office versions all work on Catalina. These three are also the versions supported by Microsoft.

Older Microsoft Office versions including Office 2011 do not work well on recent macOS versions and with various known bugs, and these older versions do not work at all on macOS Catalina as these older versions are all 32-bit app software and thus incompatible with Catalina.

You will need to purchase Office 2019, or purchase an Office 365 subscription, or consider an alternative including LibreOffice, or the Apple iWork apps and that can read and write most Office documents. All of these alternatives are free. Office licenses and Office subscriptions are not.

Please see the previous discussions of this as well.