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Microsoft is brutally awful with older versions of Word. Basically, they want you to buy a subscription to Office 365, so they make it incredibly difficult. I had to uninstall Office on my old computer, and still couldn’t reinstall it on my new computer. We don’t want to talk about how hard it is to actually buy a new copy of the standalone program.

I’m not an Apple user, so I can’t comment on Pages, but someone told me you can save Pages documents as Word documents, so that might be helpful if you really need the Word format. 

But anyway, congrats on the new Mac!  

Microsoft will still sell Office “outright” instead of the “crippleware that only works with an Internet connection,” for about $240, but you have to buy it straight from Microsoft, not the Apple App Store.

And, it isn’t the “Intel vs Apple Processor” issue, either.  The current Mac OSX, even the “A chip CPU” version, will run older “Intel era” OSX programs via an emulator.  However, the Office install program claims that I already have a “newer version of Office installed,” and I haven’t been able to find out anything about what exactly the Office installer says that it sees.  This computer was new out of the box, and I had not installed anything on it.

But, at least it “plays nice” with my iPhone.  And all, or at least most of the websites that were “broken” on the old iMac work just fine with this new one.  I’m tolerating the Bluetooth keyboard with no “forward delete,” and I bought a Logitech MX Anywhere 3S Bluetooth mouse to replace the POS mouse it came with, along with a USB hub and a DVD burner.

Thanks.

I wound up buying Office as a digital download, and got the product key via email, which is the least secure method for purchasing software ever. The biggest issue was getting past the zillion “Are you really sure you don’t want Office 365 because it’s neat and you can save everything to the Cloud and everyone will think you’re completely awesome and we get RMR which is our dream scenario because we don’t have to do a damned thing to get your money every month” sales pitches.

Of course, the installer was suspicious about my older version of Office that had lived on my 10 year old Dell, despite my having uninstalled it. I was lucky enough to get someone in Tech Support who actually knew what they were talking about, rather than just reading from a canned script. It was a miracle...