MacBook Air 13″
Office 2016 is dead. Microsoft no longer supports it.
Pages, included free with your Mac, can work with word documents, though some formatting may be lost.
There are also numerous free alternatives to Microsoft Office out there.
Microsoft does offer a free tier of Microsoft 365. It does not include locally installable apps, but you can use the web based versions for free.
If you want Microsoft 365/Office specifically, you will be stuck replacing Office 2016. These days, Microsoft pushes "subscription" (rental) versions, although they haven't entirely eliminated the purchase option – the way that Adobe did with almost all of its products.
There are versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that you can access from a Web browser that are free to use for now. They may not be as complete as the desktop versions.
Office 2016 is too old to work on a new Mac.
LibreOffice is one popular free office suite.
The LibreOffice Suite may pose some learning curve for you after using MS Office 2016. They have substantial PDF documentation written with LibreOffice Writer. LibreOffice has versions for Intel and for Apple Silicon on their download site. You want the latter for a new Mac.
Do you know if LibreOffice is able to open and edit documents saved as Word docs (in the 2016 Word version)?
jthavis wrote:
Do you know if LibreOffice is able to open and edit documents saved as Word docs (in the 2016 Word version)?
Yes it can.
Office 2016 won't activate on new Macbook
