Office for Mac 2011 reached end of support on October 10

Oct 12, 2017 06:12 GMT  ·  By

Just as scheduled, Office for Mac 2011 reached end of support on October 10, which means this month’s Patch Tuesday was the last one for the productivity suite running on Apple computers.

Office for Mac 2011 has been quite a popular choice for Apple users, but without support, running Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook means that systems could easily become vulnerable to attacks.

Security flaws that are found in Office suites and which could exist in the 2011 version would remain unpatched without support, and hackers could use the vulnerabilities as a way to break into Mac systems.

Microsoft launched Office for Mac 2011 nearly 10 years ago and because the company already extended mainstream support, the firm no longer offered extended support for the built-in apps. The mainstream support is the period of time when Microsoft keeps providing feature updates and security updates, whereas the extended support only brings security fixes to its products.

Office for Mac 2016 or Office 365

It goes without saying that customers who are running Office for Mac 2011 are recommended to update to a newer version as soon as possible, with Office 2016 clearly the best option since it’s supported until 2025.

Office 2016 is also fully supported on macOS High Sierra, as compared to Office for Mac 2011 which indeed worked okay on this particular version, but which Microsoft says could be affected by a number of compatibility issues which will never be fixed.

Moving to the latest version guarantees the longest support, but as an alternative, the firm says Apple users could also switch to Office 365.

As compared to Office 2016, Office 365 is offered as a service based on a subscription, which means that customers will always be running the most recent version with all updates applied and known vulnerabilities fixes. This is also Microsoft’s recommended option for customers.