Welcome to the new Office for Mac!

Google docs is a total epic fail when it comes to exporting a PDF.

8 Best Microsoft Office Alternatives for Mac Users

Almost three years in on the Mac version and it is still full of embarrassing bugs and functionality gaping holes. I wish Microsoft well, I really do, but its upgrade to Word for the Mac increases the steps I need to take for common operations. When came out with. Single-spaced files copied from. So also Word and Word However, in several tests with —original typed work, files copied from other Word files, and files copied rom the Internet, I once got two typed lines single-spaced.

Office Software and Apps for Mac

That did not recur. In , I found a way to continue creating. However, requires that I convert from. A workaround: Copy a picture, graph, or chart from a dummy. Unfortunately, the same conversion is needed when one adds a page to a document.


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Perhaps I could work around that as well, but I stopped trying, discouraged with Word I deleted from my computer, fearing a malign influence, even if caged in Trash. In , as I did in With , I had to go halfway down Insert to get to the Page Break choice. I use Page Break sometimes more than 10 times a day, as I import files from the Internet and add them to existing files. Microsoft staff, introducing Word , wrote that one go to a Paragraph menu in the ribbon to add a Page Break,, the most inefficient way to do that. One can also use Pages, to the left of Paragraph, and choose Page Break there.

One suspects that logical engineers redid Word to suit a certain orderliness, with little regard to what actions users most commonly use. Perhaps that was to conform to smartphone use. I prefer a page plus three lines of another page. Worst, perhaps, the version of Word does not automatically reopen files that open when one quits Word, voluntarily or forcibly. That could present a major problem if changes to an open file had not been saved before a Quit.

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Word does automatically reopen files. One suspects that Microsoft people did not let Apple provide that automatic reopening feature.. I had also read that one needs Word in High Sierra, which prompted my upgrade. I have since been advised that Microsoft will not support in High Sierra. I do not know what that implies for Word if I upgraded to High Sierra. Would I lose automatic reopening of files in Word?

So I have to stick with Sierra.

I have nearly 30, Word files since or so, which take up nearly 9 gigabytes on my computer. I spent four intense days trying to make Word work, with the continuing nastiness of forced format conversions. File format support is excellent, and you can save your work in native Microsoft formats for easy sharing with Office users.

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There's the occasional ad, but these are few and far between. They certainly won't get in the way of your work, and you'll easily forget that everything in this suite is completely free. Polaris Office lets you save your work to the cloud and sync it across three devices, free of charge.

Top 5 Free Microsoft Office Alternatives

If you own a Samsung phone, you might already be familiar with the mobile version of Polaris Office. This cross-platform free office software is available for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, and comes pre-installed on some Samsung handsets. You can decline all of these — just keep an eye out. This is necessary because Polaris Office is a cloud-based service. Your free Polaris account comes with 60MB monthly data transfer, 1GB cloud storage, and can be used across three devices one desktop and two mobile.

Upgrading to a premium Polaris account gives you access to extra features including a PDF editor, removes ads, and the ability to search within a document. As with all the free office suites in this roundup, there's support for Microsoft file formats from onwards.

1. Google Suite

It also offers effortless conversion to both PDF and Epub formats, which is a welcome addition. Unfortunately, some key features are exclusive to the premium version of the software. Some of these like tabbed browsing are nice to have but non-essential, but the lack of a thesaurus is a real drawback for anyone who writes on a regular basis. FreeOffice doesn't look quite as smart as WPS Office, but if you dislike the Microsoft ribbon and find it unintuitive then you'll prefer the slightly more old fashioned approach to navigation.

Open is more than just an office suite — it's a full cloud desktop thatdrags in a selection of great open source usually desktop-based software and puts it right in your browser. Everything the desktop versions of those packages do can be done here, and every format they support is supported. There's a desktop client to handle file transfers and mirroring your cloud storage to your hard drive, although you'll still need to run the software itself in-browser.

Being full-on desktop software it's reasonably heavy both in terms of load times and the stress it puts on your system. But get your whole team on board and its collaborative tools could make this an essential component of your workflow, particularly if you're hotdesking or using a variety of hardware. Share Pin Email. A productivity writer who teaches Office software to students and pros. Updated December 10, What We Like Free. Capably tackles most common Microsoft Office tasks. What We Don't Like Installation occasionally glitchy.

Intuitive interface, but not as sleek as Microsoft Office. What We Like Open-source, with frequent updates. Extensive help through documentation and large community. Reliably compatible with Microsoft Office formats. What We Don't Like No integrated cloud storage.