Q: Just upgraded to Lion X - now all my Microsoft stuff ( Word,Excel etc ) will not open and all those items appear lost.  What am I missing ??

If you were using Office 2004 or earlier, you need to upgrade it or switch to a product such as OpenOffice or iWork.

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You got duped into updating to 10.7 without adequate notification from Apple that doing so is going to break your PPC based software that's what happened.

You can choose the lenghtly process of reverting back to Snow Leopard where your software worked or buy new versions of that software or use something for free like LibreOffice that will run your Office files.

http://roaringapps.com/apps:table

10.5 to 10.6 to 10.7 upgrade experiences

How to revert your Mac to Snow Leopard