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Software subscriptions are the way things are going as the developers need a sustainable way to update software. A regular one is $100 per year, and they have a personal subscription for only $70 per year. You can use the current versions in the Mac App store with an Office 365 subscription. Catalina only supports modern 64-bit apps. So I downloaded and installed the latest v4.42 version (December 14, 2021).So it sounds like you were using very old versions of Word and Excel that were 32-bit. The release notes mentioned that Microsoft switched to a new CDN in the v4.40 release, which triggered me to try updating it manually before trying something else. So I went ahead and found the release notes of Microsoft AutoUpdate and found that it can be downloaded and installed separately from Office itself. In contrary to others on the forum, it did not fix the issue for me. Hostname:~ user$ sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/.plist Hostname:~ user$ sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchAgents/.plist
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Hostname:~ user$ sudo launchctl stop /Library/LaunchAgents/.plist Hostname:~ user$ sudo chown root:wheel /Library/LaunchAgents/.plist hostname:~ user$ sudo chown root:wheel /Library/LaunchDaemons/.plist The permissions of the AutoUpdate files should be root:wheel according to the post. While searching for a solution on the Microsoft Office forum, I found a post that mentioned to check the AutoUpdate file permissions in the LauchAgents and LaunchDeamons system folder and reload it.
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The MAU version that had the issues was v4.39 (September 14, 2021). This was really annoying, because Office apps kept notifying me of available updates after every restart of one of the Office apps. Now it did open the tool, but it looked like it failed updating itself and got stuck in the “Installing” state before it could update Office. Normally it starts Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) which searches for Office updates. A constant appearing message in Word and Excel about to “Check for updates” triggered me to start updating Microsoft Office on my Mac.
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