I chose Microsoft Word for Mac when I switched to a MacBook Pro some years ago. For Apple enthusiasts who want to use Microsoft’s Office software on a Mac, iPad, or iPhone, you can easily download the full Office 365 bundle, or any of its individual apps, from the Mac App. You can see the main User Voice suggestion for this, 'Access for Apple PCs' with 72 vote.Microsoft has rejected as 'No Current Plan' for that as well as each of the other dozen+ suggestions for this, with Microsoft. Yes, like Karl Donaubauer had mentioned, Microsoft Access is not available for Mac and isnt expected to be any time soon, as much as I (and many others) may wish to the contrary.
![]() Microsoft Access Like Software Software On ARtf (rich text) file format, which almost any word processor can read. But if your documents are simple text files, then a lot of programs will load them.I tried to avoid this problem by saving all my files in Microsoft’s. If your documents include multiple columns, embedded images, custom fonts, footnotes and similar features, you can more or less forget about using anything else. This depends on the complexity of your files. Boxed OfficeThe traditional advantages of buying boxed copies of Office were that you could use it on two PCs (a desktop and a laptop, but not at the same time) and that you could transfer it to a new PC. But even if you switch to a free alternative, you’ll spend time learning a new interface and handling your old documents. If you are not a business, you can certainly live without it or use the free online version. If you’re paying staff, say, £20,000 to £60,000 a year, and can’t afford £100 a year for Office 365 – less for a boxed version – then you have bigger problems.Decide where you are on the spectrum from “I like it” to “can’t live without it”. This applies in spades to files that use VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and macros, and to Excel spreadsheets where errors can have career-ending financial consequences.This isn’t going to change in a hurry because Microsoft Office is also a platform with hundreds of add-ons and plug-ins, it’s supported by thousands of books, video tutorials, websites and consultants, and it’s what most office workers already know how to use.And when time is money, the cost of sorting out incompatibilities and usability issues is far higher than the cost of Office. But I found I still needed Word to compare files, and to cope with the publishing industry’s use of styles, comments and “ track changes”.The third reason is that we live in a world where Microsoft Office is the de facto standard for business documents, and you absolutely have to be able to read them accurately. Get office 365 for mac freeIt will be more than the usual £12 a year. You can divide the price by the number of years you expect your 2012 MacBook Pro to last. I suspect Microsoft will support it until 14 October 2025, which is the end of support date for Office 2016, and that Office 2022 (yes, there will be one) will only get five years.A further complication is that Microsoft only supports the last three versions of MacOS.Office Home & Student 2019 looks like a bargain at £119.99 or less, but that’s a single-installation version. That means you’re unlikely to get the full 10 years we used to get by moving Office to new PCs, and perhaps explains Microsoft’s attempts to reduce its 10-year support lifecycle.In fact, Microsoft has only announced mainstream support for Office Home & Student 2019 for the five years up to 10 October 2023, with extended support marked “Not Applicable”. If you lose the activation code, you can’t get a new one without giving Microsoft proof of purchase.Cheaper versions of Office are locked to the PC on which they were originally installed. If you lose the DVDs, you can download the software. Windows users also get Microsoft Publisher and the Access database.It’s not a bad deal for £59.99 a year – or £49.75 if you get the activation code by email – if you use the storage. Extra features over the Home & Student edition include Outlook, the desktop email and organisation program, 60 minutes of Skype calls, apps for Android and Apple iOS smartphones and tablets, and 1TB of online storage instead of 15GB. Photograph: MicrosoftOffice 365, launched in 2013, is the cloud-based version of Office, but usually provides access to the full desktop programs as well. If you can share the cost, it’s terrific value, because each user can install the full Office on multiple PCs and Macs. For a family of four, it’s only £20 per year each. Everyone gets their own terabyte of storage, up to 6TB in all. This costs £79.99 a year for up to six users, including friends. Alternatives to WordLots of programs claim they can read Microsoft Word. It’s not clear how useful most of these are to solitary users, apart from instant translation. Second, Office 365 has various collaborative and AI-based cloud features. The Office 2019 versions are fixed. First, the 365 programs have more and better features, because they are continuously updated. LibreOffice is both open source and free, so it will only cost you the time needed to try it.The less-well-known German suite SoftMaker Office has a ribbon interface and uses Microsoft Office file formats by default, without conversion. Otherwise, your best bet is LibreOffice 6.2.2, which now has its own optional ribbon interface. Just keep your original files, instead of overwriting them.You could start with Apple’s Pages, because it’s free, and you may have it already. If you only write plain texts, you should be fine. You will need to load and “save as” a few of your most complex documents to see how much of the formatting survives. As mentioned, the success rate generally depends on the Word features you use. Unfortunately, the free version includes advertising, which I found unbearable, and the Premium version isn’t worth $29.99 a year. WPS used to claim 100% compatibility, and it’s actually pretty good. Of course, nothing stops you from using both.I was also going to suggest WPS Office, the suite owned by China’s Kingsoft, but it only has Windows, Linux, Android and iOS versions, not MacOS. ![]()
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