If having Word and Excel aren’t important enough to you to spend $70/year, then there are alternatives. But I’d imagine eventually it will be subscription-only. The old method where people bought it as cheap as possible and then didn’t update for 10+ years was killing the industry.Īs you can see wit that link they still do offer a “Office Home & Student 2019” one-time purchase for $150 if you really want that. Software subscriptions are the way things are going as the developers need a sustainable way to update software.

A regular one is $100 per year, and they have a personal subscription for only $70 per year. You can use the current versions in the Mac App store with an Office 365 subscription.

Catalina only supports modern 64-bit apps. So it sounds like you were using very old versions of Word and Excel that were 32-bit.