Any alternative to buying Microsoft 365 for Mac OS?

From the LibreOffice Site

https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/system-requirements/#Apple

The software and hardware prerequisites for installing on a Apple macOS computer are as follows:

• macOS 10.15 or newer
• Intel or Apple silicon processor
• 512 MB RAM
• Up to 800 MB available hard disk space
• 1280x800 graphic device with 256 colors

As a lifetime user of MS Office I gave up about 6 years ago and now I use LibreOffice. For simple spreadsheets and documents it's very easy to get used to and use. My Excel macros transferred across OK. If you're writing complex documents with outlining, indexing, contents and so on then the differences from Word are a bit greater but there is a ton of online help and support.

That won't be easy. There are a fair number of good alternatives out there, but none of them support a version of macOS back that far.

There's the paid, or free version of SoftMaker Office, but it requires macOS 14.x or higher. The only notable difference between them is the free version has no spell checking.

There's also the free LibreOffice, but that is even more strict in its requirements. According to their site, it requires Sequoia or newer, ignoring the obvious that there is currently nothing 'newer'.

My first thought was that I would just have to re-subscribe to Microsoft 365 but I'll still have the same issue re updates.

Correct. MS doesn't support macOS versions back that far anymore. You'd be paying for a subscription you can't use.

Your only way out of that is to use a much older installer that can be applied in Monterey. But I'm not sure if you could do that. Monterey was released in October of 2021, and you can get Microsoft 365 installers, directly from MS, all the way back to 2019.

But then the question is, since MS is now only supporting three macOS versions, current and two back, would it install? And if it did, could you activate it?

Microsoft Word and Excel are pretty standard. IMO, you'd be making it hard on yourself and others if you used another type of software.

I had a late 2013 iMac that I used until the wheels fell off. I got a new iMac (2023) mostly due to Microsoft Word running excessively slow (no updates, also). I recently bought Microsoft Home Office 2024 (standalone) and I'm happy with it.

anonymous-imac-user wrote:

Microsoft Word and Excel are pretty standard. IMO, you'd be making it hard on yourself and others if you used another type of software.

I had a late 2013 iMac that I used until the wheels fell off. I got a new iMac (2023) mostly due to Microsoft Word running excessively slow (no updates, also). I recently bought Microsoft Home Office 2024 (standalone) and I'm happy with it.

I've been using MS Word and Excel since the late 80s and I'd describe myself as a fairly advanced user of both packages. The transition from Excel to LibreOffice was seamless. All my spreadsheets transferred OK, including formulas, charts and macros. Nothing needed editing apart from some formatting. The only things different are setting page sizes and scaling, but I don't remember any drama at all with my excel files. Simple Word docs are similarly easy. I write large, complex tech reports with sections, outlining, figures, cross-references, contents, indices, headers, footers and mixed page layouts. There was a bit of a learning curve with these more complex features, but existing Word docs transferred across with very little pain. If you write these sort of docs then expect a bit of learning with lots of decent support online.

The only downside of LibreOffice I've found after using it for 6 years or s - and this doesn't really affect me - is editing docs on mobile devices. There is an app, called Collabora, which works OK, but it's a bit clunky in my experience.

Try it. It's free. You can download it and use it and see how you get on with it.

Oh! I saw the 15 in their 10.15 requirements and mixed that up with Sequoia 15.x. So yes, LibreOffice will definitely work in Monterey, 12.x.

Microsoft Word and Excel are pretty standard. IMO, you'd be making it hard on yourself and others if you used another type of software.

That only comes into play if you're using features almost no one uses, or even know exists.

I use the paid version of SoftMaker Office. And only after testing the free version with most complex Word and Excel sample files I could throw at it.

I did that testing while I still had a couple of months use left on my Office 365 subscription so I could see how each could open the same files. There was nothing MS Office could do that SoftMaker Office couldn't.