how do I uninstall Microsoft office 2008 that was transferred with all my data to my new Mac Book pro. I want to install Microsoft office 2021

You’ll probably have to manually remove files, since the uninstall utility won’t run either. You can try following this guide from Microsoft, but it doesn’t cover Office 2008, so you might have to take it with a grain of salt and some common sense: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/uninstall-office-for-mac-eefa1199-5b58-43af-8a3d-b73dc1a8cae3

For a new version of Office, there are two options. Paying the Microsoft 365 subscription, via the Office apps available from the App Store, and getting every new Office version and feature when released;

Or, buying the one time purchase version (of Office 2021, do not buy 2019), from Microsoft’s website, and going to https://setup.office.com/?ms.officeurl=setup to finish setting it up, downloading it, installing it etc.

Be very careful with your Entourage data if you were using that. Do not remove the Main Identity folder as it contains all of your Entourage data.

It cannot be imported directly. The oldest data that can be imported into Office 2016 or later is the data from Outlook 2011. So you must first find a way to open your 2008 data in Outlook 2011. Then you can import that into Office 2021.

The thing is, the easy way, the uninstaller, should have probably been run on the old computer before transferring, since it won’t run at all on a new Mac. Not that it would have sprung to mind before making the transfer however…. There’s a comment on a Microsoft forum here that says how you might go about a basic uninstallation (bottom comment): https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/safest-way-to-uninstall-office-2008-without/e3a3eae5-6243-4abf-8172-88ad6ad2d440

Experience: But in the past, I installed Office 2016 over Office 2011 for Mac, and it still worked perfectly fine. You could just give it the benefit of the doubt…

Then just do the simplest thing and remove the Office 2008 folder from the Applications folder. Yes, there will be a lot of little stuff left on the drive, but they'll also be inert cruft.

Then there should be no issues with your documents under Office 2021. It's just a matter of manually removing Office 2008.

There’s an old article here that looks like it could help: https://www.macstrategy.com/article.php?21

(It’s a third party site, so probably don’t click on the adverts).

I like AppCleaner Free, safe and does a very good job