It’s fairly easy to leave Windows behind. Just buy a Mac, take a couple of days to settle in, and never look back. But for Microsoft Office users, the need to buy Office for Mac again can be a hassle.
If you work in a traditional office environment that runs on Excel and Word, you might have to bite the bullet. But if you’ve outgrown that world and still need to edit and send Office documents every now and then, you have alternative options.
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May 07, 2020 LibreOffice, Apple iWork, and Calligra are probably your best bets out of the 5 options considered. 'Free, open source and cross-platform' is the primary reason people pick LibreOffice over the competition. Despite all the features, the freedom and the flexibility that Linux may offer you, new Linux users face a lot of issues when they switch to Linux; such as not being able to use Microsoft Office. You can use alternative MS Office suites that are available for Linux, which will be the topic of this article. Following is a list of the best Linux office suites. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers collectively make iWork, which is a good office suite for MAC. It is offered free to the users who bought MAC after 2013. Others have to buy it from the App Store.
If you’re not ready to buy Microsoft Office, here are your best Microsoft Office alternatives for Mac that are free.
1. Google Suite![]()
If you’re going to let go of the Microsoft world, your best bet is to join the Google alliance. Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides are the three alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. There’s no real alternative to Outlook beyond Gmail, and you can get OneNote on Mac for free.
Google’s suite is really good and integrates well with your Google account. You’ll be able to open an Excel file you received via Gmail in Google Sheets with a quick button press.
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You can easily import Microsoft Office files to work on them, then export them again in Microsoft Office formats to pass them around. And if what you’re doing is fairly basic, with standard fonts and formatting, you can get away with it. The other party will never find out that you’re not using Microsoft Office proper.
In some ways, Google Docs is more powerful than Microsoft Word. There’s an extensive add-on gallery, beautiful templates, superior research tools built-in, and Google search capabilities to boot.
Plus, there’s the advantage of Google’s cloud prowess. Collaborating with multiple users simultaneously in a document is a pure joy. It’s a little benefit, but it does wonders for productivity.
The entire suite is free and you get 15GB of storage included. The only problem is that there’s no real desktop app for any of these (though you can work offline on documents in Chrome, using the Offline mode). Accompanying apps for iPhone and iPad are great too.
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Visit: Google Docs | Google Sheets | Google Slides
2. LibreOffice
LibreOffice is widely recognized as the best open source alternative to Microsoft Office suite. This means it’s completely free and available on a host of platforms. It’s the best Office alternative for Mac.
If you’re used to the Microsoft Office user interface (pre-Ribbon era), it won’t take you long to adjust to LibreOffice. Unlike Google’s apps, the LibreOffice suite comes with fully featured offline desktop apps with all the pro features you expect.
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To make the deal even sweeter, LibreOffice recently added an online component. So you can sync files from Google Drive or OneDrive and edit them right in LibreOffice (there’s no collaboration feature, though).
LibreOffice also does a good job in regards to formatting when importing Microsoft Office documents. Even complex Excel spreadsheets imported into LibreOffice Calc work like they should.
LibreOffice actually grew out of OpenOffice, which used to be the de facto alternative to Microsoft Office. But OpenOffice hasn’t seen any meaningful updates recently, and its management is considering retiring the project. So we advise you to stay away from OpenOffice. Conversely, LibreOffice’s track record in the recent past has been great.
Download: LibreOffice (Free)
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3. iWork Suite
Included with your Mac is the iWork Suite: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. These are Apple’s own alternatives to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Pages, for instance, is the best Word alternative for Mac.
As these are Mac-centric apps, the UI is quite different. Instead of being top-heavy, the options show up in a contextual menu on the side. And you don’t have as many options as the Microsoft Office suite. Since all three apps are now matured, all the basics are covered.
Once you get used to them, they’re actually pleasant to use (something we can’t necessarily say about Microsoft Office). While customization options are limited, everything that’s available is quite polished. When you create a presentation in Keynote, chances are you’ll end up creating something beautiful. The same goes with Pages—moving text, images, and graphs around is a seamless experience that doesn’t make you want to pull your hair out.
The iWork Suite lets you import and export documents in Microsoft Office formats (it will save to the default iWork format, though). And as long as you don’t use a Mac-specific font, doing a back-and-forth with Office documents shouldn’t be a big problem.
iWork also has online collaboration options but frankly, I wouldn’t recommend using them. They’re nowhere near as reliable as Google’s offering.
Download: Pages | Numbers | Keynote (Free)
4. Office Online
When nothing else will do, just open Office.com. It essentially gives you access to free Office for Mac. Office Online is Microsoft’s free and basic Microsoft Office service that works in any browser.
While the feature set is limited, the basics of document editing, spreadsheet formulas, and presentation options are all covered. You’ll get access to Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
Visit: Office Online
5. Edit Office Documents in Dropbox
Dropbox’s partnership with Microsoft means you can open a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document shared with you on Dropbox. You don’t need an Office 365 license, but you’ll require a free Microsoft account. Using this option opens your document in Office Online.
6. Ditch PowerPoint for Better Online Tools
PowerPoint is powerful, but it’s also pretty old-school. If you want to stand out with your presentations, try some more modern online presentation tools:
7. Embrace Markdown![]()
Here’s an idea purely out of left field. If you given up Windows and embraced the Mac platform, you must have started appreciating macOS’s simplicity by now. If you want more of that for creating and editing plain text documents, you should try using Markdown.
If your Mac isn't compatible with OS X El Capitan, the installer will let you know. You can upgrade to OS X El Capitan from on any of the following Mac models. Adobe xd for el capitan. Your Mac also needs at least 2GB of memory and 8.8GB of.introduced in 2009 or later, plus MacBook (13-inch, Aluminum, Late 2008)introduced in late 2008 or laterintroduced in mid 2007 or laterintroduced in early 2009 or laterintroduced in mid 2007 or laterintroduced in early 2008 or laterXserve models introduced in early 2009To find your Mac model, memory, storage space, and macOS version, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu .
Markdown is a syntax What Is Markdown? 4 Reasons Why You Should Learn It NowTired of HTML and WYSIWYG editors? Then Markdown is the answer for you no matter who you are. Read More like HTML, but it’s much simpler. When you use a Markdown app to write, you don’t get lost in dozens of menu options. All the formatting happens using shortcodes.
So for example, to make a word italic, you wrap it with asterisks. You can create a complex formatted document without ever lifting your fingers from the keyboard. Plus, Markdown exports as clean HTML and you can generate beautiful PDFs using apps like Ulysses.
If Needed, Use Microsoft Office Without Paying for It
Buying the latest version of Microsoft Office will cost you a few hundred dollars (or a subscription for Office 365). Most of the time, the options listed above will suffice for you. Google Docs works as a great alternative to Word, and the same goes for Sheets and Excel. If you’re looking for offline alternatives, LibreOffice should be more than enough.
Top Office Suites For Macos Windows 7
But there might be times where you have to use Office for a particular task or for a limited period of time. There are a couple of ways to do this without paying, including using Office Online or one of the mobile apps. We’ve outlined all your options in our guide to using Microsoft Office without paying for it 6 Ways You Can Get a Microsoft Office License for FreeFree Microsoft Office licenses are hard to get, but they do exist. This article covers six ways to get Word and Excel for free. Read More , as well as picking up a cheap Office license 5 Ways to Get Cheap Microsoft Office and Word LicensesLooking for the cheapest way to get Microsoft Office? Here's how you can get the productivity suite for a fraction of the price. Read More .
Top Office Suites For Macos Free
The Microsoft Office suites: Office for Windows, Office for Mac, and Office for iPad provide the greatest level of compatibility between any disparate suites, but there can never be complete compatibility between different apps, except for the most trivial of apps. And, like them or hate them, no one can ever call the Office apps “‘trivial”.
Latest version of yosemite for mac. Comparing the feature set of these three suites, I think everyone can agree that Office for Windows is on top, Office for iPad is at the bottom, with Office for Mac squarely in the middle. (See a detailed comparison here.)
Win Office > Mac Office > iPad Office
Don’t get me wrong – I have all three suites, and I use and like them all, but that doesn’t mean I am blind to their differences. (And that doesn’t mean I have given Microsoft a boatload of cash — I got all three suites as part of my $100/year Office 365 subscription — a bargain at twice the price, IMHO.)
A Windows user has only one choice: Office for Windows. Similarly, an iPad user can only choose iPad Office. But a Mac user can choose to run Office for Mac natively or Office for Windows in Parallels Desktop in a Windows virtual machine. Which one to choose? Any performance or usability differences? What about feature differences?
First, let’s dispel any talk of performance differences. Macs today have an over-abundance of processing power and Parallels Desktop for Mac runs so efficiently that there is no perceptible performance difference between Office for Mac running natively and Office for Windows running in a virtual machine. Perhaps, with a stopwatch and a really quick trigger finger you could measure some sub-second differences, but you would never notice these differences in actual use.
Usability differences between these two suites have gone by the wayside in the 2016 suites, with MacOffice largely adopting the WinOffice user interface (UI), and losing most of its unique Mac UI advantages that made it so distinctive in past years.
Office suite on MacTop Office Suites For Macos Download
So, what about feature differences, since as stated above Win Office > Mac Office. What does a Mac user lose if they pick MacOffice over WinOffice to use on their Mac? There are a bunch, and here is a list, which I have divided into major and minor differences:
Major differences:
There have been several truly important additions to Office in the last five or six years — Office Open XML-based document file formats, the Ribbon, and SmartArt, to name a few — and these have appeared in both WinOffice and MacOffice. The latest important addition to Office, however, is only in WinOffice, and that is Ink. Ink is the ability to annotate or add content to an Office document with a stylus or finger on a touch screen in an extraordinarily natural way. There is no stylus or touch screen on the Mac, so naturally Microsoft has not brought Ink to MacOffice.
But, if there is no stylus or touch screen on the Mac, how does WinOffice in a virtual machine provide any differences? Parallels Desktop 12 for Mac, when running WinOffice 2016 in a Windows 10 virtual machine does give the user the capability to use Ink on the Mac.
See this blog post (and others in the near future) for all the details and lots more examples.
There are more feature differences between WinOutlook and MacOutlook than there are between any other pairs of apps in the two suites. Some of these differences are support for older Exchange versions, voting buttons, Visual Basic support, conversation clean up, and many, many more, but see this blog post for a much longer, but non-exhaustive list.
Top Office Suites For Macos Download
Minor differences:
Despite an immense amount of excellent work by the MacExcel team in recent years, there are still some WinExcel features that are not supported in MacExcel. Opening a spreadsheet containing one of these missing features results in the dialog you see in figure 3.
Top Office Suites For Macos 10
Among my many character flaws, I am a font addict. (My t-shirt that states “Who ever dies with the most fonts wins.” kind of gives this away.) Often, just the right font will convey exactly the feeling I want in a presentation. But, if I show this presentation on another computer, or email it to someone, that font will not show up. So, a PowerPoint add-in like Convert Text to Outlinesis a godsend, enabling me to make sure that font will always show correctly, and Convert Text to Outlines, like almost all other add-ins, is only available in WinPowerPoint. However, once converted to outlines in WinPowerPoint, the slide will render correctly in WinPowerPoint or MacPowerPoint on any computer, even if that special font is not available there.
To be fair, in choosing WinOffice over MacOffice for use on the Mac, you do lose the fantastic Reorder Objects feature in PowerPoint, and that is a significant loss. It used to be the case that choosing Word in MacOffice gave you Publishing Layout View, but, alas, Microsoft removed this powerful, groundbreaking feature from Word in MacOffice 2016. A real pity.
So, for me, WinOffice is the clear best Office to use on my Mac. What’s your clear best choice? Leave your answer in the comments.
Top Office Suites For Macos Free
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