Office for Mac 2019 - upgrade?

[julianhj]

I've been using MS Office for Mac 2019 for a few years, and today received a message stating that no update was available as support has been discontinued. I'm not keen to go the subscription route for 365, and the most recent perpetual license appears to be Office 2021. I'm not sure whether to just keep running Office 2019 and take the risk in terms of security, upgrade to 2021 (and likely be in the same position in a couple of years) or bite the bullet and start paying for 365.

I'd much rather stay with Microsoft as I'm comfortable with Word and Excel, and haven't really gelled with the alternatives when I've tried them.

Any opinions? Thanks...

 

[ChrisD.]

You can get O365 Family for cheaper than direct from Microsoft. Amazon, Argos and a few others often run deals where you can buy 1 year, 15 months, 27 months at times. I recently bought 12 months from Argos (which also comes with McAfee which I don't use) for £49. You can stack them up to 5 years from memory. The benefit of family is you get 6x accounts, and if people don't use them you can just create new email addresses for 6x 1TB OneDrive storage too.

 

[julianhj]

Cheers, I'll bear that in mind.

 

[visibleman]

I'm not sure whether to just keep running Office 2019 and take the risk in terms of security, upgrade to 2021 (and likely be in the same position in a couple of years) or bite the bullet and start paying for 365.

Office 2021 EOL's in Oct 2026, so you will get a few years out of it and you can get good deals for it. As @ChrisD. mentions though, the MS365 Family subscription does go on offer a handful of times throughout the year from various retailers (keep an eye on HotUKDeals etc).

If you still want to stick with 'retail'/a perpetual license and want to wait a little then Office 2024 gets released end of this year and currently rumoured to be middle of October.

 

[CuriousTomCat]

I still use Office 2007 on my PC and all my documents open when I email them to people. My Excel formulas all work in later versions. Office 2019 should be good for another 15 years at least.

 

[julianhj]

Office 2021 EOL's in Oct 2026, so you will get a few years out of it and you can get good deals for it. As @ChrisD. mentions though, the MS365 Family subscription does go on offer a handful of times throughout the year from various retailers (keep an eye on HotUKDeals etc).

If you still want to stick with 'retail'/a perpetual license and want to wait a little then Office 2024 gets released end of this year and currently rumoured to be middle of October.

I'll remain hopeful that Office 2024 is my best option. I don't need to do anything quickly, I've uninstalled the auto update element to stop the nagging upgrade reminders.

 

[julianhj]

I still use Office 2007 on my PC and all my documents open when I email them to people. My Excel formulas all work in later versions. Office 2019 should be good for another 15 years at least.

I've run older software for longer in the past. I suppose my fear these days is centred on vulnerabilities of unsupported software, but I suppose the chances of exploits being found and used is low.

 

[CuriousTomCat]

I've run older software for longer in the past. I suppose my fear these days is centred on vulnerabilities of unsupported software, but I suppose the chances of exploits being found and used is low.

Games don't get security updates. I was playing GTA San Andreas recently. That's had no security updates for 20 years. It's not an issue.

 

[julianhj]

Games don't get security updates. I was playing GTA San Andreas recently. That's had no security updates for 20 years. It's not an issue.

Yes, I think I was being over-cautious.

Separately, it's not like MS are going to be rolling out some major new feature that I'll desperately want either.