Or, you can use Google Docs or Open Office or something else. You can just use Pages and Numbers, which you get for free with your Mac. If having Word and Excel aren’t important enough to you to spend $70/year, then there are alternatives. But I’d imagine eventually it will be subscription-only. The old method where people bought it as cheap as possible and then didn’t update for 10+ years was killing the industry.Īs you can see wit that link they still do offer a “Office Home & Student 2019” one-time purchase for $150 if you really want that. Software subscriptions are the way things are going as the developers need a sustainable way to update software. A regular one is $100 per year, and they have a personal subscription for only $70 per year. You can use the current versions in the Mac App store with an Office 365 subscription. Catalina only supports modern 64-bit apps. Office for Mac that comes with a Microsoft 365 subscription is updated on a regular basis to provide new features, security updates, and non-security updates. So it sounds like you were using very old versions of Word and Excel that were 32-bit. Microsoft Word For Mac Download For Free Update history for Office for Mac.