Microsoft Office 2011 Mac 64 bit upgrade

too late for many.

Why should we be forced down the subscription route? I avoid subscriptions to keep monthly outgoings under control - this is why people end up in debt when life takes an unexpected turn and income drops, so please dont say with hindsight that would have been the best option.  Wouldn’t be so bad if MS offered an upgrade at a one off price.

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.

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

• for a new version, or don't want to be ensnared by the Office 365 SAAS.  Minus whatever the costs of the bare-bones-QA they did.

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"?

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.