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DebtheHen Author

Level 1

4 points

PDFs won't open after updating to OS Big Sur

I had problems with my MacBook Air and rebooted the lot following Apple Support's advice (over the phone). Since then, I have been unable to open my PDFs; Word, XLS and other Office documents. I did buy the Office suite for Macs on the old version but do I need to purchase new ones?

What if I just want to read my pdfs and word documents etc?

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jan 14, 2021 7:31 AM

Top-ranking reply

mulberry58

Level 6

10,224 points

Posted on Jan 14, 2021 7:51 AM

Your older Office-version is probably 32-bits and doesn’t work on Big Sur.

You have 3 options:

buy a new version (e.g. Microsoft 365)
use Apple’s own Pages, Numbers and Keynotes. These apps are already on your Mac but possibly don’t match with all your needs
download the free Office Libre for Mac. It works fine together with Office-files. You can open them, work on them and save them. To let this happen automatically: after dowloading and installing, right-click on e.g. one Word doc. Left-click on Get info. In the new window, Look at Open with and select LibreOffice. On the same window, click on the button Change all

about Pdf- files: Open them with Apple’s own PreView: also already on your Mac

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PDFs won't open after updating to OS Big Sur

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