Originally Posted by
Finkface
My Macbook Air (circa 2012, still running Mojave. Yes, I am a dinosaur.) got damaged during a recent power outage. I have it fully backed up am replacing it with a new Macbook Air. I kept the old Mac on Mojave because I really only use it for Zoom meetings and bigger Word or Excel work and I had MS Office 2011 installed on it as it is not supported beyond Mojave. For everything else, I use my iPad and I have Office Suite on that which gives me adequate spreadsheets and Word docs that are compatible with Office. But I do need the Mac to have Word and Excel.
Why buy a new laptop that will not run the software you need/want? There are several online resellers that trade in older, refurbished machines that will happily run Mojave and compatible versions of Office. For the MacBook Air, you would need a 2019 or earlier model to run Mojave. I have bought several refurbished laptops (also a Mac Mini and a 'trash can' Mac Pro) from OWC (macsales.com). They currently have units for sale that would meet your specs for <$300.
IF (could be a big if) you still have your Office 2011 installation media and serial number
and the means to 'roll back' the installed OS on a 'new' used compatible laptop to Mojave (MacOS 10.14) this could be your solution. Note that you might also need to buy (or borrow) an external DVD drive and/or a USB-C compatible thumb drive (or adapter).
My other suggestion would be to see if your word processing and spreadsheet needs might be met by Apple's complimentary Pages and Numbers apps. While the feature set of neither completely overlaps those of Word and Excel, they are quite robust and should be able to open and save documents in the Office 2011 formats. When opening Office docs, Pages and Numbers generally display an info box stating any MS specific functions that don't directly translate and any workarounds or modifications needed for compatability.
Finally, if you're a dinosaur I'm a trilobite. I keep an old first generation 2006 Mac Pro tower running primarily to use Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 (because I too hate subscriptions), rip DVDs and archive photos. It
never connects to the Internet these days since the last MacOS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) security update was more than 10 years ago but it still boots up quickly and runs flawlessly.
