I have been using MS office for many years, but there is no longer an option for a single license. They want u to have a subscription to Office 365 at $70 year. I know Apple has alternative products, how hard is it to cover my Excel and Word stuff?
—–
larry
MacMost Q&A Forum • View All Forum Questions • Ask a Question
Replacing Microsoft Office With Mac Apps
Comments: 3 Responses to “Replacing Microsoft Office With Mac Apps”
Comments Closed.
Many pro-level apps have switched to a subscription model: Microsoft, Adobe, etc. These models allow them to fund their software development groups without putting pressure on them to stuff new (sometimes not very useful) features into a new update every year, but instead work on usability and stability.
But if you are not using these professionally, then you may want to go with non-pro apps. Pages and Numbers are Apple's versions of word processing and spreadsheet apps. They are free. For most uses, they are the equivalent, and maybe even nicer to use. But really high end features like Word's customizability and macros, and Excel's pro-level functions (like pivot tables) are missing.
But since these are free, why not try them? You can open Word documents in Pages, and Excel documents in Numbers. So it should be easy to try. There are lots of tutorials on both here at MacMost, and I have courses for each of these (see the right sidebar here).
Larry- If Apple's Pages and Numbers doesn't support some of the features you've used in your old MS Office files, there is also the free, open source LibreOffice suite which aims to be a cross platform alternative to the MS Office suite and support the MS Office file formats.
Once you have opened the Word or Excel document in Pages or Numbers, be sure to save it in that program!