Microsoft have announced that Office 2011 for Mac will have it’s support and updates ended on October 10th 2017. The software, which was originally released in late 2010, is the last version before Microsoft introduced its subscription version with Office 2015, now 2016 for Mac. Microsoft say they will not be testing it in the new High Sierra MacOS coming out this autumn, and no feature or security updates will be released after the October date.
Third party tests, with the latest High Sierra demos from Apple, indicate that Office 2011 is extremely unstable with features that don’t work and the software quitting often. The older Mac versions have always been a little unreliable and buggy for some core features, but this seems to be addressed in the more recent versions. Updates to the Mac versions seem to be less frequent than Windows versions, which is not entirely unexpected form Microsoft, given its biggest market is the Windows platform.
Office 2011 is probably the most widely used version on the Mac at the moment, but this latest news should make people take the step to upgrade and move on to the latest versions, which are more compatible and reliable. The subscription model that Microsoft uses is not as expensive as you might think.