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I purchased Microsoft Office 2011 along with the purchase of my MacBook. I did an upgrade yesterday only to find that Office 2011 will only run on 32 bit. The upgrade now requires Microsoft Office to run on 64bit. I read in many places that Microsoft has no intentions of supporting this upgrade so therefore, I can no longer safely use this software, that I purchased, on my mac. Microsoft is forcing me to purchase something I have already purchased earlier. I do not care if there are newer versions of Microsoft Office. I purchased Office 2011 and Microsoft should still honor that purchase by providing the 64bit upgrade. I contacted support thru their chat box and was only directed to this site where I can look up or post my own questions. Really great customer support Microsoft! Thank-you! NOT. I wish to have a refund or a product key to another Microsoft Office that will run on Mac at 64bit. I'll be holding my breath awaiting even more outstanding customer service.
Processes in Microsoft 365 for setting up Office apps, redeeming product keys, and activating licenses.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Your license is good forever on your current hardware.
The real maximum is that your license expires when your hardware wears out or when you ditch your current operating system.
Mac OS Mojave is an upgrade from High Sierra, so apparently High Sierra was 32 bit
and Mojave is 64 bit. I can check with Apple, but your message says that my version of Office should work forever. Thanks for your help, but I'm not certain that is true.
MacOS has had 64bit support for a long time.
Support for 64 bit was added on version 10.5 - leopard - 2007. A long time ago but you could run both 32 and 64 bit applications . Mac OS are going to get rid of the 32 bit support soon which is why this is a problem for people like us who bought the 32 bit version of Office.
Mac OS Mojave is an upgrade from High Sierra, so apparently High Sierra was 32 bit
and Mojave is 64 bit. I can check with Apple, but your message says that my version of Office should work forever. Thanks for your help, but I'm not certain that is true.
Assuming Apple has not gotten rid of any APIs that Office 2011 uses (*), if MS wanted to make a 16-bit version of Office 2011, would it be as easy as turning the "Compile for 64-bit" in xCode (or maybe more likely Xamarin), and then letting it run for a few days recompiling a few million (ten million) lines of code?
(*) Or inexplicably changed the names of functions as they are wont to do: "Collection:get(withCondition: excludingCondition: number)" will become (ItemCollection:getItemsWithCondition(_ excluding: returnNumber:)", and other such "pronoun-changing nonsense" that drives everyone batty)
If so, it should cost them - I don't know - at most a MW or so of power to run the compilation server, whatever it would cost to do a cursory QA on the resulting binaries (do they open, do they work as expected to a basic level), and then on-going update server costs?
Then they sell it as a paid $9.98 upgrade, with some tight leagalese saying that MS is in no way responsible for anything. Profit per unit, somewhere between $1-8. Depending on how many Office 2011 users are out there who don't want to shell out - whatever
Would it be that simple?
Given that OSX Mojave *will* actually run (correctly) Office 2011 in it's current 32-bit state, albeit with the warning that 32-bit will be unsupported at some unspecified time in the future - I'd think it should.
Of course, such a "just-a-dumb-recompile" job might not get speed benefits that come from specific optimizations for 64-bit, and perhaps run a bit slower (because it wouldn't do things to take advantage of being able to store - I don't know - store really big floating point numbers in one register instead of 2.
Of course, if it has pieces of assembly in it written specifically for a 32-bit Intel architecture.. Then it becomes more difficult.
Would it be that simple? Or is this just extraordinarily naive, thinking of a few-million line codebase as if it were just "Hello-World-times-a-billion"?
Hi Christine
No one is forcing you do to do anything.
You are not being forced to install Mac OS updates. If you don't pull the rug from underneath Office 2011 by installing an operating system for which it was never designed to run, then you can continue to use Office 2011 forever, or until you hardware breaks.