I just updated to Lion - Now Microsoft Office doesn't work - Please help, just starting finals at schoool and can't have this slowing me down.

You mean "Mountain Lion (10.8.2)", I guess.

Yes, ML does not support apps anymore that were for PPC Macs or would run under Rosetta. You seem to use MS Office for Mac 2004, which is such an app. Other than downgrading back to Snow Leopard, the other option you have is to purchase and use MS Office for Mac 2011. More here, including purchase option for a Home & Student license, and a free trial as a potential 'very quick fix'.

As LousyFool indicates, MS Office 2004 will not work in Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) or Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8). One option is to upgrade to Office 2008 or 2011. Another is to buy Pages, Numbers and Keynote from the App Store. They'll be cheaper, but are not quite the same. They will open Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, though. Finally, you could get a free Office clone like OpenOffice or LibreOffice.

For the future, note that you should NEVER install a major system upgrade, or do anything else like that to your computer, when you are approaching some kind of major deadline and have no time for troubleshooting.

Thomas A Reed wrote:

For the future, note that you should NEVER install a major system upgrade, or do anything else like that to your computer, when you are approaching some kind of major deadline and have no time for troubleshooting.

...and you may FIRST check if your existing apps/drivers/tools/hardware is fully compatible with the new system... and if not in their present state, if and how you can replace/upgrade them, too.

In other words, depending on what else you have installed or running on your machine, you might be sitting on a few more "time bombs"...

In the future you can check here first for a given App's you own compatibility with the OS X version you are considering Upgrading to:

http://roaringapps.com/apps:table

Hope this helps 🙂

When finals are over, and you are done with the trial version of Office 2011, here is a post that I assembled for another who needed to continue to run his PowerPC applications in Lion/Mt. Lion (updated slightly for your situation):

Unfortunately you got caught up in the minor miracle of Rosetta. Originally licensed by Apple when it migrated from the PowerPC CPU platform that it had used from the mid-1990's until the Intel CPU platform in 2006, Rosetta allowed Mac users to continue to use their library of PPC software transparently in emulation.

However, Apple's license to continue to use this technology expired with new releases of OS X commencing with Lion (and now Mountain Lion). While educational efforts have been made over the last 6 years, the fact is that Rosetta was SO successful that many users were caught unaware UNTIL they upgraded to Lion or Mountain Lion.

Workarounds:

1. If your Mac will support it, restore OS X Snow Leopard;

2. If your Mac will support it, partition your hard drive or add an external hard drive and install Snow Leopard into it and use the "dual-boot" method to choose between your PowerPC software or Lion/Mt. Lion;

3. Upgrade your software to Intel compatible versions (in this case Office 2011), or find alternative software that will open your data files (there are various free "open office" alternatives available);

3. Install Snow Leopard (with Rosetta) into Parallels and continue to operate Office 2004:

[click on image to enlarge]

Full Snow Leopard installation instructions here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439

NOTE: STEP ONE of the instructions must currently be completed on a Snow Leopard or Lion Mac and the resulting modified Snow Leopard.cdr install file can then be moved over to your Mountain Lion Mac for completion of the remaining steps.

NOTE 2: Computer games with complex, 3D or fast motion graphics make not work well or at all in virtualization.

Restore your SL bootable backup/clone or Time Machine backup and run MS Office '04 apps in a viable computing environment. If you don't have any of those, then what the others stated.