Is Microsoft Office 2016 compatible with MacBook Air M4?

The 64 bit version of Office 2016 should work through Rosetta.

However, the installer for Office 2016 won't since it's a 32 bit installer.

If you need to keep using an Office like product to open Word documents, and don't want to move to Pages yet, try out LibreOffice. It's free, and supports MS formats fine.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

As the other gent wrote, yes and no.

Office 2016 for Mac should run with Rosetta, though it may not receive updates and patches beyond its end-of-service, which would've been in 2021 at worst or 2023 at best. Technically, Microsoft doesn't support that version under macOS Big Sur and later

Microsoft would have you move to Office 365, which would give you the equivalent of Office 2024 (?) and, as a subscription, would give you support in perpetuity plus remote storage and Teams access. Otherwise, you'd probably need a standalone Office 2021 or later to be safe. You could also try Pages (free with new hardware) or LibreOffice (which has an Apple Silicon build).

--Nate

FYI: There is a free tier of MS 365 which gives you access to the web based versions of Office at no charge.

As has been pointed out, you will have a problem installing Office 2016 as the installer is not 64 bit.

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote can open MS Office files directly, though some formatting may be lost on complex documents.

You may just want to rip the band aid off now and start using Pages, etc. You can use the web based office apps in a pinch if you run into trouble.

Always a bit of a slippery slope, this.

You're essentially playing leapfrog with either the end of OS support or the end of product support. And unless you really know what you're doing, you lose either way. That's at least in part why I favor LibreOffice over Microsoft on machines that I would give out. Actually ran into an identical situation with a Mac I was forced to sell. Microsoft actually cut off support for both Skype and Office 2019 on that unit. And the new teams wasn't going to go on there. Granted, I use neither, but I require similar program for video conferencing. And they may have run fine now, but there's no telling when the manufacturers would cut off Monterey, given that Apple and other vendors already have.

with that being said, the timeline given in my last post were estimated based on support for previous Office entries. Office 2004 was an incredibly rare exception; Microsoft really bungled Office 2008 when it launched, and remove macro support. So, as the Intel Macs were coming into focus, Microsoft went beyond its usual five years of Mac product support and extended it to 7 years.

When it comes to reading and editing office documents, the path you take to achieve that is entirely your own. As users ourselves, we can only hope to guide other users in what we hope is the proper direction.

--Nate

The free online version of Office 365 is not bundled with anything.

You can access it at https://www.microsoft365.com with your Microsoft Account.

The installer is likely 32 bit as I suggested above and probably won't work, but you can try and see if it does.

Office 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024 “perpetual”, and reportedly with at least one more “perpetual“ license planned after 2024.

Pages and LibreOffice can read most Office docs.

LibreOffice particularly can read some (usually older) Office documents that even Office itself can’t.

Glad everything worked.