Buying MS Word for Mac?
September 15, 2020 10:24 AM   Subscribe

Is it possible to purchase Word for use on a Mac without any kind of subscription? I can't believe I'm wasting a question on this but there you have it.

I need to use Word, full stop. (Do not suggest alternatives.) I'm currently using an older MacBook Air, and Word for Mac 2011, which works just fine for my needs. But I'm potentially going to upgrade my laptop, and I've been told the old Word doesn't work on new Macs. I'm happy to purchase a new version of Word but not if it means I'll also be paying a yearly subscription, since I literally need zero of the additional Microsoft Office programs. I just need Word.

Help?
posted by BlahLaLa to Technology (8 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: You can't get just Word, but you can purchase it so it's not a subscription. This page - it's the far right option, called "Office Home & Student 2019 - One-time purchase For Mac and PC".
posted by hydra77 at 10:29 AM on September 15, 2020 [6 favorites]


(FWIW, Word for Mac 2011 will not run on MacOS 10.15 aka Catalina. If you stay on 10.14 aka Mojave, as I have, it will continue to work. However, a new Mac laptop will of course come with Catalina, and rolling back to Mojave would probably be very difficult.)
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 10:52 AM on September 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


Microsoft Word - Work together on Word documents
[Search domain office.live.com/start/Word.aspx] https://office.live.com/start/Word.aspx
Collaborate for free with an online version of Microsoft Word. Save documents in OneDrive. Share them with others and work together at the same time.

don't know if this works with Mac
posted by ydaltak at 11:10 AM on September 15, 2020


My employer has this "Office Home Use Program" that let me buy word and excel et al for very very cheap and download i for use on my personal laptopt. It was $20 bucks or something and it was a one time purchase. I don't know if this is an uncommon thing but maybe ask at your work if you have an employer.
posted by cmm at 11:16 AM on September 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thank you for that link, hydra77. Not sure why on earth it was so impossible for me to find it -- I guess they really don't want you to not get the subscription.

And Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell, yeah, that's exactly my issue. Old Word working fine on my oldish laptop but new laptop will come with Catalina so I'm screwed. (Though honestly I don't mind paying for a program I use daily, and having gotten almost 10 years from Word 11 I especially don't mind paying.)
posted by BlahLaLa at 11:40 AM on September 15, 2020


Given your most recent comment: Consider installing an old pre-Catalina version of osx on a separate partition on your new laptop. You could dual boot into either os version as needed. Folks are doing this quite a bit to run old software on new Macs, especially the gaming community around 32bit versions of games that are not getting updated. This is not an ideal long term solution, but if your copy of Word runs on Mojave just fine and you don't mind rebooting for occasional doc editing, it's a possibility.
posted by enfa at 2:37 PM on September 15, 2020


Apple specifically prevents machines from running older operating systems than the version which came with the machine (it's more complicated than that, but generally true.) If you need to run something in Mojave, and you have a machine running Catalina, your best solution is to use a virtual machine via Parallels, VMWare, or VirtualBox (all example links; your mileage may differ...)
posted by blob at 4:03 PM on September 15, 2020


Also see How to Get Microsoft Office for Free (or Under $50)
posted by blob at 4:13 PM on September 15, 2020


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