Office 2021 Home & Student--how many users?

Hi Jack,

I agree with your response about the OS being the only criteria but Apple's site has a list of which Mac's are compatible under the "Compatibility" heading. The oldest one they list is 2014.

https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/product/HPSL2LL/A/microsoft-office-home-and-student-2021-one-mac

There definitely wasn't a miscommunication with the Apple advisor. She clearly responded that Office 2021 Home & Student was not compatible with my late 2012 iMac and I would either need to go with Microsoft 365 or find a copy of Office 2019.

Red

Mission accomplished. I first removed Microsoft Office 2011 from my iMac--I started by removing the application and then dug a little deeper to remove the other Microsoft files. I am definitely an amateur and after some googling I was able to get through it. Not all internet searches provided accurate detailed information on the removal of Office 2011. I purchased the Office 2021 Home & Student from the Microsoft site, got my product key and off I went. Downloaded the program and installed it. Everything is working as hoped for both users of our iMac.

Additional Comments:

1. Some vendors including Microsoft indicate that Microsoft Office 2021 is for one PC/Mac and 1 user/person. This is hugely confusing to novices such as myself. Assuming that I understand the term "user" correctly, my wife and I are 2 users on the same iMac. Maybe from Microsoft's perspective, the login account required me to sign in and then that automatically provides access for my wife as well. Once I started installing Offie 2021 this became much more clear to me in the Microsoft installation instructions.
2. The Apple site indicated that Office 2021 Home & Student was not compatible with an older iMac such as mine (Late 2012). This doesn't seem to be correct either. I did call the Apple help line for clarification and spoke with a sales representative--it seemed that they were looking at the same information as I was and they were adamant that Office 2021 Home & Student was not compatible with my iMac. I probably should have spoken with a tech. I suspect that as others have said that all you really need is to be running the Catalina OS on your iMac, which is what I have.

Disclaimer--I am not an expert by any measure but thought I would try to relate my recent experience in hopes that it will help someone else.

Red

Thanks Jack.

I took a brief look at Apple iWork and I have used Pages and numbers in the past. Most of the people I interface with use PC's so the documents still need to be in MS Word or Excel formats. I don't think this can happen with Apple iWork but I may be wrong on that.

I have been a bit confused about Microsoft Office Home and Student 2021 when sharing a Mac. There seems to be conflicting information from multiple vendors. On most sites I see it as "For 1 PC or Mac" and "For 1 Person". Here is the Microsoft site that shows it better https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/microsoft-365/p/office-home-student-2021/cfq7ttc0h8n8?activetab=pivot%3aoverviewtab. I wonder if that applies more to a PC but not a Mac?

Red

I am not sure if I understand the question. We each have to login separately if that is what you mean. We each have separate user admin accounts

Not too sure if this helps but when I installed Office 2011 many years ago it was accessible for both of us. I am suspicious that may not be the case any more.

I may have also stumbled on another problem that Office 2021 is shown on the Apple site as not being compatible with our late 2012 iMac. So even though I have updated it to Catalina 10.15.7 the iMac may still be too old???

I really appreciate your help!

Red

Thanks everyone.

Yes, I am pretty locked in to MS Office for work reasons and it would be difficult to get away from it. Having said that I just took a look at FreeOffice and it may have some potential for us.

Our iMac is a good machine that is more than capable of what we need to do. I am hoping to squeeze a few more years out of it by updating it as much as possible now before the next major OS update prevents me from doing that.

I will report back and let you know how everything turned out.

Happy New Year!

Red