LibreOffice is the best “alternative” to Office on the Mac. IWork is more comparable to Microsoft Works than it is to Microsoft Office. If iWork was that good, then Apple would not have. 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. Major milestones were recently announced for two Mac OS X-compatible software suites that could provide an alternative to the near-ubiquitous Microsoft Office. OpenOffice for Mac is a completely free alternative to Microsoft Office for Mac and the equivalent of Word in OpenOffice for Mac is Writer. OpenOffice was originally created by Oracle but is now developed by Apache and one of the most widely used MS Office alternatives on Mac.
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Microsoft Office is one of the most frequently used application suites across the globe. It has been a business staple for decades and is also frequently used in homes and schools. Many Windows users who consider switching to the Mac often cite the need for Office among their biggest hesitations or concerns about making the switch.
While a Mac version of Office has been around as long as Office itself, it’s a costly prospect for many consumers, and the Mac version often lags behind the release cycle of the Windows version. Add to that the fact that an Intel-native version of Office has yet to be released, and it becomes clear why alternative products are something worth exploring for any Mac user—especially when there are some great alternatives available.
iWork
One of the first alternatives that spring to mind for many people is Apple’s iWork, perhaps because a trial version is included with every Mac (along with a demo version of Microsoft Office). iWork consists of a word processing tool called Pages and a presentation tool called Keynote (Apple is rumored to be developing a spreadsheet tool to be included with the next release of iWork).
While Pages can technically be called a word processing application, it’s actually a combination word processor and layout tool. For consumers and small organizations, it can function as both an alternative to Word and as a low-cost alternative to the basic features of InDesign or Quark.
Pages, which features an interface that’s similar to iWeb’s interface, lets users easily add pictures via the iLife Media Browser, develop charts, create pages of text or text boxes, insert tables and columns, and make use of a variety of formatting tools. Like iWeb, it features an Inspector palette that can be used to apply all manner of effects to included text, shapes, charts, tables, and images—making it easy to create visually stunning documents quickly and easily.
Pages supports importing from and exporting to Word format, although it cannot directly open or save Word documents. Imported documents do maintain Word formatting and styles and if a document is created from a Word template, all style information will be retained. Pages does have a user interface that is a complete departure from that of any office suite. Combined with the fact that it works much like a layout tool, this can make transitioning between Pages and Word a bit of a challenge. Also, it doesn’t offer support for many of Word’s advanced features.
Keynote is, in some ways, more impressive than PowerPoint. It offers a wide variety of templates and transitions that are visually stunning. Like Pages, it offers access to photos and other digital media via the iLife Media Browser and offers a wide range of effects that can be easily rendered to any slide elements. Keynote’s user interface includes many elements similar to iWeb and Pages (including the Inspector). However, its interface remains more standard than that of Pages. Unfortunately, while Keynote is an amazing tool, it offers no compatibility with PowerPoint or other Office file formats—meaning that to play a presentation requires Keynote (although presentations can be exported as QuickTime video files).
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If you are a Mac user but do not want to download MS Office on your Mac Book, then there are quite a many alternatives for Microsoft Office which you can download for your Mac device. If your Mac Book is mostly used for the purpose of office related work, then Excel and Word will be the most used tools on your iOS device as all kinds of office work like drafting letters and making tables or sheets are done with the help of this software.
These alternatives are actually developed because it becomes quite difficult for the iOS users to shift from their Mac Book to the Windows PC because apps on the Windows system do not work that efficiently as compared to the Mac devices especially when it comes to the Microsoft Office apps, they are much more efficient than the default apps used by Mac users. But the problem arises when your only work is to edit and send Office documents every now and then and do you are not able to do that efficiently just because you are a Mac user and you do not want to shift to the Windows system.
To solve this major problem, software developers have developed a lot of tools for our Mac users which can be considered as the best alternatives to the Microsoft Office Apps and work exactly like them. So, here we are providing a list of the Microsoft office alternatives for Mac users which can be used in place of the MS Office tools. Do check them out.
8 Best Microsoft Office Alternatives for Mac Users:-
If you are not associated with the Microsoft world, then you must join the Google alliance if you want to do your office work efficiently. Google Suite provides you a list of extremely amazing apps with the help of which you can easily manage and organize your office work. Microsoft office alternatives include Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides which we can say are the best alternatives to Office, Excel, and PowerPoint respectively. The best alternative to Outlook is obviously Gmail and all these apps for Google Suite are totally free of cost.
Best Office Alternative For Mac
Libre Office is basically an open source app which is the best alternative to the MS Office suite and the most amazing thing is that it is totally free of cost. The Libre Office carries almost the features as the MS Office, so you will not at all feel odd when you use this app or tool. Apart from that it has a number of cool offline desktop apps just like the Google suite and you can also sync your files with Google Drive or One Drive and you can edit your files as well.
Another best alternative to Microsoft Office for our Mac users is the iWork suite apps. This app includes quite amazing tools like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote which are the alternatives to our favorite Microsoft apps which are Word, Excel, and PowerPoint respectively. Though these Microsoft office alternatives are comparatively a bit heavy and you don’t have that many options available as there are in the Microsoft apps, but still, it works quite efficiently and is quite widely used by our Mac users.
Quip is another Microsoft office alternatives apps but does not have that many features as there are in the Microsoft Office but if you are using Mac and plus if you are not comfortable with Word and Excel, then this app will obviously work for you. The Quip app works best with the editing thing and is mostly used for personal work only. The formatting of the documents is done by using short codes which are supported by the Quip app. Log on to
Office Programs For Mac
When you are left with no other option, then you can log on to Office.com which provides you with the best basic and free Microsoft office alternatives online. Tough the features are not like those as we have in our original Microsoft Office tools, but still, it has the basic features like editing the documents, putting formulas in spreadsheets and preparing presentations, etc. At one time you will actually feel as if you are using MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint tools.
Dropbox used for Mac devices when gets collaborated with the Microsoft Office tools, then you can easily open your Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents created in Microsoft on your Mac device. For this, you do not require an Office 365 license but just a Microsoft account through which your documents get synced with your Mac device. This makes Dropbox one of the most convenient and easy Microsoft office alternatives tools if you are a Mac user.
Microsoft PowerPoint is a very innovative and powerful tool created by Microsoft Office, but apart from that, there are some new quite innovative tools which are nowadays used instead of the MS PowerPoint especially by the Mac users. These microsoft office alternatives include Slides, Prezi and Canva. Slides is used for making attractive and beautiful presentations and also lets you give your presentations online. Then we have Prezi which is a great tool for visual effect for your presentations. Then lastly is the Canva which is an online image editor tool.
Best Free Office Alternative For Mac
This tool is just like HTML but works on a much easier mode. It has around 25 writing option in the menu bar and shortcodes are also used in this while formatting the documents. Apart from that you can also create amazing PDF files through this app and can even create a complex document quite easily. These Microsoft office alternatives surely a must have app for every Mac user which can be used instead of the MS Office tools.
So, these are the 8 best MS Office alternatives for Mac users.
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