Interesting. If I already have iCloud and my MacMini for storage and and my personal domain on FastMail for ad-free secure email, does Microsoft Basic give me anything I need? All that I need on the higher levels are Word (which I need for Change Tracking and ability to write equations and other sophisticated math or science stuff that I send and receive from other people). I haven’t tested how compatible Keynote is with PowerPoint, but I haven’t given any talks lately. My spreadsheet needs are minimal and I have no interest in Copilot. Maybe I’ll see how long I can go without Office 2024.
That’s interesting. I have the Microsoft 365 Basic subscription, charged at $69.99 yearly. That’s what a Personal subscription used to cost before MS added AI and raised the price to $99.99. But I found out that the $69.99 price point was still available without the CoPilot integration, so I changed my product from Personal to Basic. Maybe if a person is about to cancel they offer a lower price.
EDIT: Ooops, I misspoke. My subscription is called “Microsoft 365 Personal Classic,” not Basic. I have all the locally-installed apps, plus the 1TB of cloud storage in OneDrive. Of course that all changes come July 13.
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Sorry for being pedantic, but I’m pretty sure that you have licensed the “Microsoft 365 Personal Classic” edition.
As others have said, Microsoft 365 Basic is $20/year for an annual subscription, so I’m just trying to avoid adding to the confusion.
Then export the Pages & Numbers files to Word & Excel format. Alternately, use LibreOffice, or other non-MS software.
Or stay with Word & Excel, which don’t require the export.
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And pay Micro$oft’s protection racket, 
Yes, pay for the tools you need. I’ve written books in Pages and in Word and they’re about the same if you take time to set them up. So, yes, I pay for the tools I need, either software or hardware.
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True…but that’s mostly long use muscle/brain memory. Numbers is different but not really better or worse overall.
I just looked at Pages 14.5 and it does offer ways to do change tracking and add in equations, but that will at best require more of my time to figure out the work-around. More likely the work-around will yield a Pages version of docx that does not exactly work with MS Word, which is likely to cause problems for my clients and take even more time to fix.
It’s like why I use tax preparation software software. I worked for H&R Block one tax season long ago, and I could sit down and file a return by hand to save money if I needed to. But paying for the tax software usually saves a lot of time and grief.
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Those options can work well for many people, but if you are part of a team that is routinely sharing or exchanging documents that go beyond basic formatting, you can run into some real headaches. Examples include tables, equations, placed graphics, and comments/tracking features.
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Just download the $10 SoftMall version and be done with it. No web-based Office apps, no need to keep your Office docs in the cloud. Note that VMware Fusion they are “packaging” is actually a free download from VMware. And I have to assume the “official updates from the app store” just means updates via the Microsoft app store – security updates, bug fixes, minor feature improvements. Again, been using this for a week now. No issues at all.
It works fine on both my Mac running macOS 13 and my wife’s computer running macOS 26. I think when MS says the latest 3 versions that they are talking at the time of release.
I don’t actually think that’s the case. I think what Microsoft means is that as they roll out Office updates—security updates, bug fixes and stability improvements, compatibility updates, minor feature enhancements and refinements, and performance improvements—their stated system requirements are based on the three most recent macOS versions. So Office 2024 may work fine on macOS 13 now, but at some point you may no longer be able to install the latest Office updates if you continue running macOS 13. That is generally how Microsoft has been referring to Office for Mac system requirements over the past five or more years.
But I’m glad it’s working for both of you!
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Well. It took two solid weeks of work – research, hours-long AI chats, trials and errors, testing, trying again, and then finally hunkering down for grunt work – but my Catalina Mac and I are finally off of the Microsoft 365 applications. I’m using SoftMaker FreeOffice 2024 to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and Thunderbird to replace Outlook. The replacements are not nearly so elegant as the MS apps, but since MS was kicking me and my subscription fee out, I had no choice.
The Outlook migration was particularly difficult since all my data was local and most migration solutions would not work for me, primarily due to the age of my OS and Outlook database, but also due to limitations that MS places on exporting from free Outlook.com accounts, and on copying events within Outlook that were created by accepting invitations.
The worst part was the calendar, where nothing would work. I ended up dragging and dropping 20 years of calendar data, one event at a time, into individual ICS files in a desktop folder, and then concatenating them and cleaning them up using scripts that Gemini composed for me. Which left me with a couple of big ICS files that imported well into Thunderbird. There was some cleanup within Thunderbird, such as to correct all-day events which ended up marked as starting at 12AM, but I was able to get through it.
I understand why people think of Microsoft as evil. I had a happy, productive, if older, system that purred along very well, was properly licensed and paid for, and for the want of a tiny installer to update an expiring security certificate, I had to jump ship and find a way to stay afloat. Well, at least July 13 is no longer a threat to me, and when fall comes and my M365 subscription would renew, I will cancel and save the $70. If anyone wants more details on how I migrated my Outlook data, without using OLM files, just let me know and I will be happy to share.
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I wonder if exporting from Outlook is supported once Office 2019 goes “read only” in July.
My guess is that exporting still will work, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it if I had important local email in Outlook.
There are a few ways to export email from Outlook 2019, including dragging-and-dropping email messages to various destinations, saving entire mailboxes as OLM archives, and others.
It can be tricky to import OLM archives into other email programs, but I’ve had good success on several occasions using Emailchemy as an intermediary to convert the OLM archive into more easily imported formats, like MBOX.
I don’t think Outlook will permit saving data externally come July 13. I don’t think it will even permit printing to PDF files, although CoPilot says otherwise. Saving my local mail folders outside of Outlook was one of the easier parts. I dragged each mail folder into a desktop folder to create a set of MBOX files. Getting Thunderbird to import those MBOX files was a little harder, but not bad in the overall scheme of this project. [If anyone wants the procedure that worked for me, I can write it up here.] Regarding working with OLM files, I could export them, but no utility I tested was able to import them successfully into Thunderbird. Even ones that were compatible with Catalina messed up the data, which CoPilot told me was due to the very old format of my Outlook database (Office 16.57). Also, from what CoPilot told me, OLM exports do not contain complete data, although Microsoft does not document this. For example, when exporting calendar data as an OLM, it does not include events that were created by accepting invitations (which was about 1/3 of my calendar).
Just to clarify, I have not been working with Outlook 2019, but with Outlook that is part of Microsoft 365. My version 16.57 may be a little newer, from January of 2022.
Excel has some macro features that Numbers does not seem to have (yet).
I am (was) using Office 2022 on Catalina MacOS 10.15.6 and no Microsoft updates will install on that system. And that’s been the case for two years now, maybe three. Office requires you to update the operating system in order to update Office (which I cannot do on my old iMac). So, no Office security updates on that system for quite a while now. My understanding is that Microsoft will only allow read-only use of the software come July 19.
Sorry to tell you it’s actually July 13
Security updates for office apps isn’t important if you only work with documents that you created. You only have to worry about malware if you open documents produced by other people.
When the certificate expires, the apps will fall-back to “unlicensed” mode, where they become viewers. Open, view and print, but no editing or saving.
You will still be able to use the web and mobile versions of the apps for editing, but those don’t support the full set of features that the desktop apps offer.