Word, Excel and PP on Big Sur

not the latest and maybe not earlier versions too

microsoft don't want to suppose older versions of macOS only the latest and the last 2 macOS versions are supported

maybe you can get hold of office 2016 but not sure if they would let you activate it on older macOS versions

an alternative would be to use Home | LibreOffice - Free and private office suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft it's free and suppose the file formats that ms office apps use

Microsoft only supports Sequoia (15.*), Sonoma (14.*), and Ventura (13.*) for current Microsoft 365 or Office 2021/2024 for Mac installations. Microsoft has retired Office 2019 and older office suites and shut down the respective license servers.

Individuals with valid Office 2019 licenses have been able to download the last version of Office 2019 for Mac from Microsoft servers into macOS Catalina, but outside of that, it is a call to Microsoft or no support for what you want to do.

If you are accustomed to using Microsoft Office in the past, the free LibreOffice is mostly compatible with your existing documents as LibreOffice is an intentional Office clone. The user interface and menus will remain a learning curve, and LibreOffice has written some quite detailed PDF guides for their applications. Note that presently, LibreOffice requires macOS Catalina (10.15.7) or later, and it is inevitable that the minimum requirement will increase to a later version of macOS in the coming months.

Another MS Office clone that is not free, but less expensive than Microsoft's pricing is SoftMaker's Office 2024/NX. There is a free trial and it has a more Microsoft-faithful ribbon bar. It opens Microsoft documents in their native format. Like LibreOffice, Office 2024 is compatible with Catalina forwards.

VikingOSX wrote:

If you are accustomed to using Microsoft Office in the past, the free LibreOffice is mostly compatible with your existing documents as LibreOffice is an intentional Office clone. The user interface and menus will remain a learning curve, and LibreOffice has written some quite detailed PDF guides for their applications. Note that presently, LibreOffice requires macOS Catalina (10.15.7) or later, and it is inevitable that the minimum requirement will increase to a later version of macOS in the coming months.

That's only in relation to the current version. I use a perfectly acceptable older version in Mavericks, and a more recent version in my High Sierra VM.

christopher rigby1 wrote:

That's only in relation to the current version. I use a perfectly acceptable older version in Mavericks, and a more recent version in my High Sierra VM.

Yes, if you installed MS Office back when Mavericks was still supported by MS, then an existing installation of those office apps will continue to work. Just don't expect to be able to use them if you ever need to perform a clean install of macOS....maybe restoring from a Time Machine backup or cloning the existing system will retain the activation, but many times those activations must be re-enabled.

Did I need to add that LibreOffice provides older versions of their Office suite for pre-Catalina operating systems?