Should You Use Microsoft Office or Apple Apps on Your Mac?

Do you need to purchase and use Microsoft Office? Free Apple apps like Pages and Numbers are good alternatives to Word and Excel. But some people may still be better off buying Microsoft Office and having both sets of apps available.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Should you install Microsoft Office on your Mac or just use Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.
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A question I'm often asked, and that I often see online, is do you need to install the Microsoft Office apps on your Mac. In particular apps like Word, Excel, and Power Point. The alternative, of course, is to use Apple's apps Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Pages and Word are both word processors. Numbers and Excel are both spreadsheet apps. Keynote and Power Point are both presentation apps. But they all do look and word differently. So, which one should you use?
You can get Microsoft's apps from the Mac App Store. They're all available to download for free. But, you're going to need a subscription to use them. You can choose from a couple of different subscription plans from the Microsoft site and then in those apps you login to be able to access your account and then unlock the app. There's also the option to do a one time purchase. You can still do that from Microsoft but it's going to cost more. Of course that is not going to include major updates. So at some point in the future you may find that you need to buy a new version to replace the aging one that you have.
Now the main reason to use Microsoft Office apps is if you're used to them. Say you've come from the Windows world, you're now on the Mac, and you have years of experience and knowledge for using Microsoft Word and Excel and you don't want to stop using them now and use something new. Well you can simply use the Mac versions of those and continue on doing things the way that you've always done. The Mac versions do look a little bit different. They are a little more attuned to the Mac interface. But you're going to find it a pretty easy transition to go from the Windows version of Word to the Mac version of Word. Another reason you may want to use Microsoft's apps is that they are without a doubt the most powerful. I love the Apple apps and I use the Apple apps myself but there is no doubt that Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel are the most powerful word processor and spreadsheet app on the market. They've been around for a long time and have tons of features packed into them. Most people, of course, don't need all of these features and some of them are really obscure and have very specialized uses. But there is definitely more features packed into Word and Excel than Pages and Numbers.
Another reason to stick with Microsoft Office apps is for compatibility. If you work with people or collaborate with people that are also using Microsoft Office apps it's much easier to pass the same documents back and forth. Not converting them all the time back and forth to other formats. If that is even going to save you a little bit of time and frustration it's probably worth the entire price of using Microsoft Office apps. Also, another type of compatibility is document compatibility. If, say, you've come from the Windows world and you have years and years worth of Microsoft Word doc files and Excel XLS files well then having Microsoft Office around to be able to open those old files is really useful. Of course you can open them in Pages and Numbers as well. But there may be compatibility issues. It could be nice to have the official Microsoft Office apps there to be able to access all your files without any problems.
Now how about the Apple Apps, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Well, the main advantage to those, without a doubt, is that they are free. If you've got a Mac you can install Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on your Mac. Just get them from the App Store if you don't already have them on your Mac. It doesn't cost you anything. In fact even if you have Microsoft Office you should probably have those apps installed anyway. They could be useful for some tasks when you don't need all the power that is in the Office apps.
Now also I believe that the Mac Apps are easier to use. For instance, take a look at Pages here. This is a blank document. In Pages you've just created a document and you're ready to start writing. You could see some buttons here at the top. You can see controls for things like font, and styling here on the right. Now look at Microsoft Word. It definitely looks more complex. Maybe only marginally so though. Instead of having things on the right everything is here at the top. This is just a portion of the controls. You have to switch between these different ribbons here at the top to actually access everything. It's really not that different from having the right sidebar there. But I think if you really wanted to compare them you would have to come to the conclusion that Word is more complex. Which makes sense since it's more powerful.
The same thing with Excel and Numbers here. Here is Excel and you can see all the different ribbons here at the top. Here's Numbers. You still have a lot of that complexity here in the right sidebar if you even want to have that visible. But I think everything looks a lot cleaner and it's a little bit easier to understand as long as you're not already deeply entrenched in Excel. Of course it is going to be hard to transition from Excel to Numbers. But if you haven't really used Excel I think starting in Numbers is going to be easier than starting in Excel.
Also keep in mind that with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote there are also free versions for the iPhone and iPad. So if you have multiple Apple devices and you learn to use Pages, say, on the Mac, you can use some of those skills to actually use Pages on your iPhone or your iPad as well and there are no compatibility issues. Plus, of course, the Apple Apps work really well in the Apple Eco System. For instance, if you save a Pages document to iCloud you can go to the Share Menu here and easily collaborate with other Mac users using Pages. It just kind of works seamlessly. There's really not too much to learn. You're just both working on the same document.
Now that is also true on Microsoft Office apps. You can collaborate as long as you save to Microsoft One Drive. If all of your coworkers or collaborators are using Microsoft Office then it might be better to stick with Microsoft Office. But if they are not, if in fact they are all using Macs, then it may be better to collaborate with them using Apple's apps.
Another thing about Pages, Numbers, and Keynote is you can still work with Microsoft Office documents. So this comes really handy if you don't necessarily need to work with those documents but you do need to view them. So, for instance, here in Pages I could open up a Microsoft Word file. No problem. It will simply convert it and it will give me warnings if there is anything that is not compatible. But if my goal here was to just read the document, like someone in the group I'm in insists on distributing basic information on Microsoft Word docs, you could still open it up in Pages to read it. If you ever want to give somebody a document to work on and you're in Pages and they are using Microsoft Word, you can always go to Export and then Export As Word and give them a word document.
So now some final advice. First, you can use both. If you paid to have Microsoft Office there is no reason you shouldn't have Pages, Numbers, and Keynote also on your Mac. In fact, I did this for years when I had to work in Microsoft Word for writing computer books, that's what my publisher used. But I did everything else in Pages. As a matter of fact this is a good strategy if you slowly want to wean yourself off of using Microsoft Office apps. You can use Pages for some things, Word for things you need to use Word for, and then as you get more experience with Pages you may find at some point you decide to ditch the Office apps. In the end the decision has got to be yours and there is no right or wrong answer. You certainly don't have to stick with the same answer. You could subscribe to Microsoft Office for a year to see how it goes and decide to move completely to Apple Apps next year. You could just use Apple Apps for now and if you find out you can't get by working with your colleagues with the Apple Apps you can then get Microsoft Office and start using that. But I do hope you found this information useful. Thanks for watching.Related Subjects: Mac Apps (21 videos)
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