8 Ways To Handle Microsoft Word Documents On Your Mac

If you need to open, edit, create, save or collaborate using Microsoft Word .doc or .docx files, there are several ways to do it on your Mac. The best way, but one that will cost some money, is to simply get Word for Mac from the Mac App Store and pay for a Microsoft subscription. But many Mac users simply using Pages instead. You can also get a couple of good third-party free office apps that will handle Word. There are even more options that don't require downloading anythng at all.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. On today's episode let's look at eight different ways that you can handle Microsoft Word Documents on your Mac.
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So I get asked by people all the time about how they can handle Microsoft Word documents on their Mac. They need to either open them, they need to be able to edit them, they need to be able to create them, collaborate with other people using Word either on Windows or Mac. Well, there are more ways than most people realize for handling Word documents on your Mac. It's just a matter of figuring out the right one for you.
By far the best way, both in quality and ease of use, to handle Word documents on your Mac is to simply get Word. There are still some people that don't even realize you can get Microsoft Word for the Mac even though it's always been an option. Actually it's easier now than ever because you can get it in the Mac App Store. That's right. If you go into the Mac App Store and search for Word it will come up. It appears even to be free. But there's a catch and I'll get to that in a minute. 
Downloading Word from the App Store is kind of new and it has a huge advantage over getting it from Microsoft or any other way. That is that the updates are a lot easier to deal with. It's just updated through the Mac App Store. If you get it from Microsoft you end up with this office updater and it's always running and it seems like there's always these little updates. It's just not as nice as getting it from the App Store. You can get Word, Excel, and other Microsoft apps from the App Store.
Once you have Word you have maximum compatibility with word documents. So you can work with them just as easily as you can on Windows. It doesn't have every single feature that it has on Windows and it has a Mac-like interface, but it works beautifully. It allows you to easily open, edit, and save Word documents and work with the people that are on Windows and using word.
The big catch is that it's not really free. You have to have a subscription to Microsoft Service, just like if you were using it on Windows. But the subscriptions are cheaper than a lot of people think. A personal subscription for a whole year is $70.00. That's all you pay. You don't have to spend money if there's a new update and you always have the latest version of Word. But it is the catch here and it's the only solution I'm going to show that actually costs money. If you use Word professionally then this clearly is the solution. But also if you happen to use Word a lot because you get a lot of documents and people expect you to send a lot of Word documents it may be worth the price.
But let's say you just don't want to do that. You don't want to get Word. There are tons of other solutions as well. Probably the most used one is to simply use Pages to open these Word documents. Here I've got a bunch of Word documents. Actually these are templates that I just created and then saved immediately using Word. I can open them in Pages. So you can get Pages from the App Store as well if you don't already have it. Of course it's free from Apple. Once you have it installed you can drag and drop onto Pages in either the App Folder or here in the Dock. You can see here you get a warning that elements aren't supported. A lot of times these are things you don't even need. So here this journal example comes out really great. The business letter looks perfect. The newsletter uses a lot of advanced layout so we're going to see some problems here. But if it's the kind of thing where somebody is sending you a finished newsletter and you just want to read it then it still works good enough. The research paper here works find as well. 
Now when you're working with a Word document in Pages you're actually working with a Pages document. So it's converting it to Pages. You're working in Pages now. If I were to go to File, Save it's not just going to Save it out. It's going to ask me to save it as a Pages document. That's the way to do it if you want to continue working with it on your Mac. Save it as a Pages document and keep working with it on Pages. But when you need to return this to somebody that doesn't have Pages, say somebody on Windows with Word, then you want to go to File, Export to, and export to Word. Here you get to choose whether or not you want the current format or the much, much older .doc format. Then Export it out. Now you're back to a Word format you can send them and they can open it on their Windows machine.
Now there are more ways to be able to handle Word documents. There are third party office suites. Free ones as well. For instance I have two installed here. One's called Open Office and the other is called LibreOffice. I can drag and drop onto those as well. Here's what happens if I drag this onto Open Office. It'll open up and it looks really good. Most of these documents do too. Let's look at the newsletter and you can see that looks pretty good. Not as good as it does in Word. There are some margin problems here but it works pretty well. The other one, LibreOffice, let's try that one out. You can see that looks pretty good there and the newsletter looks very good. You can download these from their various sites. They are pretty popular office suite alternatives.
Another option is to use Goggle Docs. You just go to the docs.goggle.com. You already have a Goggle account if you use gmail, and then you could go to this folder here, open the file picker, you can do upload and you can drag a file to it. It will upload a Word document and then convert it to a Goggle docs document. Then it opens it up and you've got access to it. Let's try the newsletter example. So it definitely struggles a little with this. You see how it breaks it onto separate pages where it shouldn't. But it's still readable. Now if you work with it here in Goggle docs you can go to their file menu here and then download it. You can see one of the options is to download it as Microsoft Word. 
One more option I want to show you is to just simply use TextEdit to open these up. It's not very useful if you're trying to work with somebody but if somebody sends you a document and it just has text in it, you just want to read it, you don't want to bother with any of this stuff, you already have TextEdit on your Mac. You can drag and drop a Word file to TextEdit and you can at least see the text inside. It works with any Word document, except of course the page layout ones aren't going to look as great. This newsletter one is going to look horrible. But you do get all of the content in there.
Now there is one other way you can deal with a Word document but it's only for reading. So this won't allow you to edit or collaborate but you can just use QuickLook in the Finder. You don't even need to use an app. Just select the file on the Desktop in a folder in a Finder window and just use Command Y or the spacebar to bring up QuickLook. You can see it actually renders out the Word document there with graphics in the QuickLook View. So you can quickly read what's there. It even works with multiple pages. You can scroll through it.
In the past when I've written computer books I've had to use Microsoft Word to collaborate with others who are on Window's machines. But for the most part I try to use Pages for word processing and if I do get an occasional Word document or need to be able to send one I use Pages to do that. You might find those or one of the other solutions works best for your situation.

Comments: 4 Responses to “8 Ways To Handle Microsoft Word Documents On Your Mac”

Douglas Brace

4 years ago

Would another option be Pages from https://www.iCloud.com?

Gary Rosenzweig

Douglas: Yes. That would work too!

Peter Emery

One can also use Preview if you need to view a Word (or other Office) document. It can then be annotated with Markup if desired before being exported as a PDF for sharing/archiving.

I quite like LibreOffice, they have a Mac app store variant called LibreOffice Vanilla.

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8 Ways To Handle Microsoft Word Documents On Your Mac

Comments: 4 Responses to “8 Ways To Handle Microsoft Word Documents On Your Mac”

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