do I have to pay for an upgrade of word ,powerpt,excel etc with the new update

Safety precautions of Catalina? No. If you mean a newer version of Office, it will have far more security updates that were never applied to Office 2011.

If you were using Outlook in Office 2011, then you will need Office 2019 or 365 in order to import all of that data.

Yes. Upgrades are not, and have never been free. Office 2011 is now 10 years old (it was released October of 2010) and MS stopped supporting it over a year ago.

If you require Office over an alternative suite, you can get:

1. The single person subscription of Office 365 for $70 per year.
2. The $100 per year version which allows you to install Office 365 on up to any 6 devices.
3. The $150 one-time cost home version of 2019
4. The $250 one-time cost home version of 2019 that includes Outlook.

That depends on the version of Office you have currently.

2011 or earlier versions will require paying for the 2019 or 365 options listed above to replace them.

The 2016 version can be updated to work on Catalina for free, though Microsoft has stated it is ending mainstream support for it by the end of this month.

Office 365 and 2019 are the currently supported versions on Catalina and going forward.

Alternatively you can go for free alternatives such as Apple's own Pages and Numbers, or LibreOffice for Mac.

You can click on the app's icon in the Applications folder, then do a right click of the mouse and move down to the Get Info line. That will open a window with various information items. Near the middle it will say: Version: XXXX. That is what you are looking for.

Which version of what? Office? If so, open the Applications folder. For Office 2004, 2008 or 2011, the folder will have the version year as part of the name. Such as this for Office 2011 (icon view):

Only if you wanted to continue using older 32 bit apps.

AcuraRDX2014 wrote:

How do I tell which version I have

Check with the app developer as to what version of their app you are running.

Look into the Free LibreOffice, it handles MS Office files like Word & Excel…

https://www.libreoffice.org/