Office 2019 switching to view-only mode—what to do?

TidBITS Talk
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I received this email from Microsoft yesterday about Office 19:

“We have an update about Office 2019 on your Mac.

Starting July 13, 2026, a security certificate update is required to keep Microsoft 365 and Office apps current. Since you have a device that cannot support this update, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote will switch to view-only mode. You can still open and read all your files, but editing and saving will not be available on this device. Your files are safe.

Office 2019 for Mac ended support in October 2023 and is no longer receiving updates. This means the certificate change cannot be resolved by updating or reinstalling your current software. Your files and documents are fully intact. Here are your options to keep working:

  • Use Microsoft 365 on the web for free. Open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in any browser, no installation required. If your files are saved to OneDrive, your existing files open and work just as they always have.

  • Purchase Office Home 2024. Check aka.ms/systemrequirements for compatible versions of macOS and Windows to make sure your device will support.

  • Upgrade to a Microsoft 365 subscription. Get the latest Office apps on up to 5 devices, with ongoing updates and support. Your files will continue to work right where you left off. Explore Microsoft 365 plans at microsoft.com/microsoft-365. To ensure this will work on your current device, check aka.ms/systemrequirements for compatible versions of macOS, Windows 11, and Windows 10.”

I am really bummed about this! I don’t want a subscription to Office 365. And Microsoft is offering Office suite for $170. Anyone know if there is a cheaper offer for Office? OR – is Pages compatible with Windows version of Office? I write newsletter articles and they have to be compatible with Windows/Mac Office.

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Microsoft Office for Mac 16.109
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If you know how to use Word—and the rest of MS Office, for that matter—LibreOffice is a free, open source way to replace MS Office with little-to-no transition/learning curve.

In fact, I decided to stop paying Microsoft for Office because pretty much all of my Word, Excel, and Powerpoint skills and habits were instantly applicable to LibreOffice. Apple’s office suite works so differently from MS Office, especially the spreadsheet, that I didn’t want to spend time relearning how to do everything in my Office repertoire.

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Jane, I received a similar email from Microsoft last Thursday 14 May 2026, although my situation is a little different from yours.

====================

Your files are safe. Here’s what to do next.

We have an update about Microsoft 365 on one of your macOS devices.

Starting Ju‍ly 1‍3, 20‍26, a security certificate update is required to keep Microsoft 365 and Office apps current. On devices that cannot support this update, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote will switch to view-only mode. You can still open and read all your files, but editing and saving will not be available on this device. Your files are safe.

The good news: your Mac can support these updates. Two simple steps are all you need to keep everything running after Ju‍ly 1‍3. You can complete them any time before or after Ju‍ly 1‍3. Full editing and saving will be restored as soon as both steps are done.

1. Update your Mac to macOS 12 (Monterey) or later. Go to “System Settings”, then “Software Update”.

2. Update your Microsoft 365 apps. Once your Mac is running macOS 12 or later, open any Microsoft 365 app, select “Help”, then “Check for Updates”.

That’s it. Once both updates are complete, everything will work just as it always has.

====================

Oh sure, “that’s it.” My six year old MacBook Pro (Intel) would not work “just as it always has” if I upgraded the OS from Catalina to Monterey (or later). It would run slower and hotter under the more resource-intensive OS, and some older applications I use would no longer work. I would lose the user interface that I prefer, which changed with Big Sur. And even my MS Office applications would be different if they were upgraded from 16.57 (my preferred version) to the latest version compatible with Monterey. Especially Outlook; the user interface would be very different indeed.

The only way everything will work just as it always has, would be if Microsoft would release a small installer to update the security certificate. But they won’t do that. And they give only two month’s notice, when they have known about this for years.

So here I am with an M365 subscription, which I won’t be able to use any longer after July 13 without upgrading the OS. I suppose I’ll try the switch to LibreOffice (version 25.8 for compatibility with Catalina) and try to find a free email client I can use to replace Outlook, something similar. Which is a shame, because I really like MS Office on the Mac, and use Outlook all day every day.

Before you purchase anything Jane, make sure it would be compatible with your current version of the macOS. And if you would need an OS upgrade, and if your hardware would support a newer OS and you’d be willing to run it, check if any of your current applications would have any compatibility issues, as some of them might need to be upgraded as well, or else replaced.

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Thanks for the advice. I am running Sonoma. I have a Lifetime copy of Office 19 and don’t know if it has an update. But I can see if it does.

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Jane, since you are running macOS Sonoma, you should be able to run either Office 2024 (perpetual license) or Microsoft 365 subscription-based applications. Office 2019 won’t be updated, since support ended in 2023. I was always happy with M365, so I would recommend that route. And if you don’t need/want the Copilot integration, a year’s subscription is just $70 rather than $100 (for a personal license).

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The security certificate situation does add a twist to the idea of “permanent” or “lifetime” licenses, and Microsoft is not the only developer affected by this. The license may be good, but that does not mean you will be able to use the software in perpetuity, at least not without potentially complicated workarounds.

Some of the workarounds include keeping the software on an unsupported platform, changing the clock on your system to a date in the past when the certificates were still valid, and so on. Usually, it is simply better to upgrade to current tools or to find an alternative tool that will work with your files.

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Josehill, the Office applications, whether 2019 or older M365 on an older macOS, are going to stop working normally on July 13 – they will go to read-only mode. There are no work-arounds. Changing the date on the Mac would not help, because the date is referenced server-side, not on the endpoint. The certificate itself needs to be updated, or else the Office apps will not be able to validate the license, and so will switch to read-only.

Apple addressed a similar issue for Catalina users back in February, when they released the 10.15.8 update, to install some new security certificates – nearly a year in advance of expiry. But two months before expiry, Microsoft tells its customers to upgrade their installed stand-alone version of Office, upgrade their macOS, and/or purchase new(er) hardware, as the case may be. Not to mention other apps that may also need to be upgraded or done without for a newer OS. They wouldn’t bother to release a little certificate updater, to resolve the issue in the least disruptive way.

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For a “non MS” alternative, I’d suggest…

LibreOffice - also very good at importing old files (such as AppleWorks, etc.).

OnlyOffice - seems a bit “snappier” than LibreOffice.

I never had much of a need to read MS documents (from Office, “from others”) at all. I found that when I did, I could do so with iWork, or 3rd-party spreadsheet apps.

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Forced obsolescence is annoying in general. It is possible to make a light bulb last forever, there is an Edison light bulb that still runs since the day it was first invented. GE decided that was dumb in a capitalist society so they engineered it to fail eventually. Samsung home appliances fail in ten years or less while my parents still have the same washer and dryer they bought when I was born and still going strong 50 years later at my brothers house. Same with the refrigerator, you can’t kill the compressor in that thing.

Microsoft does it with their operating systems, Windows 10 being the latest example. Apple does it with their hardware where at most you’ll get 7-10 years before you are too far behind and must upgrade or risk being hacked online. Sadly it is necessary to do so or these companies would go out of business.

Sure even Linux did it with the 486 architecture in the kernel. But it had a fabulous run of 37 years almost to the day. Meaning you could have run the latest Linux kernel on a 486 computer up until April of this year! You have options on old hardware with Linux. You don’t have to run Gnome / KDE you could run XFCE with Thunar instead, using far less RAM and GPU. Heck you could run now GUI and stick with tmux and command line programs and text user interfaces forever.

Yes with computer chips and software things are moving very fast and yes things are going to become obsolete but that doesn’t mean they are dead. You shouldn’t be forced into an upgrade cycle that seems to get shorter as time goes on.

My wife’s 27” iMac won’t run the latest macOS anymore. I’ve ordered a new Mac Mini which will be much faster and more powerful and I already have another 27” LG 5K monitor on hand. But now I have to wait 6 weeks to get it because of those dang Clawd Boi’s buying up all the Mac Mini inventory. It’s pending shipment from China right now.

I bought a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen12 a couple generations behind the latest from B&H Photo as it was a floor display model on clearance. I got it for 50% off from its original retail price. About what I would have paid for a MacBook Air 15”. It runs Linux exceptionally well, everything worked out of the box except for the facial recognition camera. Well scratch that, technically the 3D camera works it is just no software to make use of it. The finger print reader works acceptably well which is to say not as well as a Mac. However, I get 15 hours of battery life out it and it is very lightweight and fast. Especially with Linux which is faster than Windows 11. I bet I can get more than 15 years out of this computer before it truly needs to be replaced. I could probably run it even longer if the hardware doesn’t fail. I don’t play video games, I do real computer work which is mostly command line and text editing. This thing does all of that exceptionally well. I even found my iPad GaN USB-C 65W charger which is about the size the of the Apple Quick Charger works with it. It fits in my front pants pocket and is 1/4 the size of the Lenovo provided charger.

I still like Apple devices. However the point is I am not locked into just Apple. Linux is my escape route. The wife is not going to be running 365 when that Mac Mini arrives, nope. I’m gonna give her LIbreOffice with the ribbon-bar theme and I doubt she will notice much of a difference because it’s going to open all her files without issue. I’ve already tested it out on her old iMac. It is far closer than Pages, Numbers, and Keynote in Microsoft compatibility. Most people don’t need all the stuff 365 gives you. In the business world its the largest piece of spyware known to mankind. Managers can indeed access a dashboard with metrics on all their employees. If you think Teams chat or email is private. Think again, IT Admins can see it all and if management demands insight to it. Well they will be granted access. Employers already were installing spyware on employee computers now it’s built-in to 365. Microsoft is also collecting massive metrics by default and using that to train A.I. Or worse selling access to data brokers, the government, etc.

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I’m running MS Word version 16.78.3 on a 2019 retail license on Sequoia 15.7.1 and have heard nothing from Microsoft about this. Any idea why?

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You’re referring to the so-called “Centennial Light”. A few key points:

  • This bulb is almost certainly a fluke. Although hand-made, it was one of many produced by the Shelby Electric company (not by Edison). The others are not currently burning.

  • Over the years, the brightness has dropped dramatically, from 60W down to 4W. If anybody was using that bulb for more than a curiosity, it would’ve been replaced a long time ago.

This bulb is actually not a bad analogy for the computer business. You can still use a 30 year old Mac or a 486 PC. But it won’t be able to do what people today expect computers to do. Just like that old bulb, they are no longer suitable for their original purpose.

Or perhaps you were thinking of Edison’s Eternal Light, which is not currently burning.

I remember seeing an ancient bulb at the Edison historic site in New Jersey. The museum staff there said they run it at low voltage in order to keep it from burning out (and it was pretty dim as a result). Which also fails to prove anything.

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Jeff, i would guess that Microsoft may not be aware that you have a license, or else may not have your current email address. Since you have a retail license and not a subscription, if you never registered your purchase with Microsoft, or registered it but with a email address you no longer use, then they may not be able to get in touch with you. But I would guess you’re in the same situation as Jane, and that if you want to continue using MS Office on your Mac, you would need to switch to an M365 subscription or else purchase a retail license for Office 2024 and upgrade to that.

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In my case, Microsoft gains nothing by forcing me to stop using M365 on my Mac, and they will lose my annual subscription fee. If they would release a simple updater for the security certificate, they would keep my money instead of losing it.

Microsoft might make some money by preventing people from continuing to use older versions of Office with retail license, if people upgrade to 2024 or move to M365 rather than switch to alternative products, but with people like me who are already subscribing to M365, MS is hurting itself as well as the customers. I think what they are doing, preventing a fully-functional product from continuing to work normally, is unethical if not illegal.

My previous MacBook Pro, a 2012 model running Mountain Lion, lasted me for eight years. My 2020 Intel model running Catalina is nearly six years old, and I hope to keep it going for at least another couple of years. At my time of life and financial situation, it’s unlikely I would ever be able to purchase another new MBPro. I am grateful to Apple for releasing the Catalina certificate updater back in February so my Mac can keep going into 2027.

As for MS Office replacement, I am testing LibraOffice and SoftMaker FreeOffice 2024. And since neither of them includes an email client, I am looking into Thunderbird as replacement for Outlook. I will manage with alternatives as best as I can.

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Just want to add I think it’s hard to directly compare the purely mechanical household appliances of the past to today’s hybrid mechanical-electronic appliances.

For example, a top loader washing machine with a short cycle and a long cycle is simple to build and easy to keep running at a low cost for years and years. But an energy efficient and water efficient front loader with multiple washing modes and a range of washing temperatures is a lot more complex. Repair costs may be higher but will be offset by less wear on clothing, less water used, and less energy used to heat water.

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Sure, but…

  • They may no longer have the build environments set up (servers, code-review services, etc.) for versions that are no longer supported. It may cost quite a bit to set these up again, and they may not consider it worthwhile, based on their estimates (e.g., from telemetry) of how many people are using these old versions.

    • Note that these build environments may require tools that are no longer supported. They may likely require old versions of Xcode, running on old Macs. If that equipment was replaced/recycled after support ended, then it may be really difficult to re-establish the environment necessary to build an updater.

  • Even if they still have the build environments, any update, no matter how trivial, requires engineering effort to develop and test, including their full suite of (hopefully automated) regression tests, to make sure they didn’t break anything. Again, that cost must be balanced against the number of users running that version.

Yes, they will lose your subscription if you can’t upgrade to a newer Mac, but how many subscriptions does it require to cover the cost of developing, releasing and deploying this “simple updater” for a version that has reached end-of-life quite some time ago? We have no way of knowing those numbers.

Ultimately, this is a business decision, not a technical one.

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David, if it is that complex, then how about this instead. Just release the file and tell us the path where we should drag-and-drop it (or perhaps add to the Keychain). Use it at our own risk, which would be a low risk if any at all, since the apps will stop working normally anyway. And if they don’t want to do this officially, then let the file and path leak out, so we the users can find it online and decide for ourselves if we’d like to try it.

I remember in 2007 when the George W. Bush administration changed the dates for start and end of Daylight Saving Time. Apple released an update for Tiger but not for Panther or earlier versions of OS X. At my job we were able to find out online how to update these settings from the Terminal, and we rolled out this manual fix to all our Panther users. Problem solved, without running emergency OS X upgrades, which were not yet free, and which would have broken other necessary software not yet compatible with Tiger.

Microsoft’s business decision is to treat Macs like second class citizens. This got better for a while under M365 subscription service, but then something like this happens to take a giant step backward.

Does this affect Windows or Android?

No. This certificate expiration only applies to Office and Microsoft 365 apps on macOS and iOS. Windows and Android are not affected.

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You assume that this is a single file that can just be swapped. Since neither you nor I know how Microsoft Office organizes their authentication software, you have no way of knowing if such a thing is even possible.

And no large company will ever issue an update with a “use at your own risk”, because if someone screws it up, they will demand restitution and no amount of “we told you so” is going to make the complaints go away.

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@janesprando , not sure what you mean by ‘compatible’. Pages is supposed to be able to open Word files and save as Word files (I’ll check later and edit this if not). I think my MBPro on Sierra might have office ’19 on it, but I know I have done this back and forth several times over the years.

If I ever registered an Office ’19, it may have been under an old address, as I did not receive this email.

Your context might make a big difference, but if the need is to simply write text you submit to a newsletter editor, there are a wealth of non-Office options. If you mean you do the newsletter, ie write and layout photos, text, art, columns, mulitple pages and chapters etc then you might be able to open the current template Word document in Pages, adjust anything that needs adjusting, and move on.

If you have a large archive that needs to still be editable in future, consider looking for an automated way to convert batches of Word files to other formats, or do a handful at a time every day til done.

The email you quote doesn’t say if ‘copying’ or ‘exporting’ can be done in read-only mode, but I wouldn’t bet on it, so hard to say how usable older documents will be. Time might be of the essence in maintaining a usable archive of newsletters.

Consider trying out LibreOffice as others have suggested it. I downloaded it and found it quite familiar and usable and it is supposed to be multi-format compatible and has its own, open document format (.odf) that might be useful.

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By “compatible”, I mean that if I write an article in Pages or LibreOffice, will the newsletter editor be able to open, read and edit my article if that person is using Windows or Mac Office.

Is LibreOffice in the App Store?

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As with all office suites, “compatible” is a spectrum.

Microsoft’s XML-type documents (e.g., “.docx”, etc.) are actually zip files containing XML files and various media. For example, a test document (with text in a few fonts and two tables), unzips to:

$ unzip Test.docx 

Archive:  Test.docx
  inflating: [Content_Types].xml     
  inflating: _rels/.rels             
  inflating: word/document.xml       
  inflating: word/_rels/document.xml.rels  
  inflating: word/theme/theme1.xml   
  inflating: word/settings.xml       
  inflating: word/styles.xml         
  inflating: word/webSettings.xml    
  inflating: word/fontTable.xml      
  inflating: docProps/core.xml       
  inflating: docProps/app.xml

Any application can open up and decode these various XML files. They will contain all the data needed to reconstruct the original document.

But…

Not every app will support every feature. It is likely that basic things, like character and paragraph formatting will be supported by third-party apps. But it is likely that some features, especially the more obscure ones (e.g., a drawing canvas containing graphics, or an embedded PowerPoint slide) may not be supported by third-party apps.

So it’s not so much a question if LibreOffice can open your Microsoft Office file - it will be able to do so. The question is whether, after doing so and converting to the native format, you will end up with the same document. That is, will the formatting and non-text content be the same, so when printed, you’ll get something identical to what you would get when printing the original from Word.

And then there’s the issue of its export functions. If, after importing a Word document and making edits, if you save the result in Word format and send it back will that user see his original plus your edits, or will there be formatting/object issues?

And the answer to this question is that it will depend on the nature of the document’s content. It is unreasonable to expect that everything will import properly, but maybe the result will be good enough. Or maybe not.

But since Libre Office is a free app, give it a try and see if it’s good enough for your needs.

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