The Best Free Microsoft Office Choices for Mac
It’s fairly easy to go away from Windows behind. Just buy a Mac, take a few days to settle in, and never reminisce. except for Microsoft Office users who do not have a Microsoft 365 subscription, the necessity to shop for Office for Mac again is often a costly hassle.
If you’re employed during a traditional office environment that runs on Excel and Word, you would possibly need to bite the bullet to appease your coworkers. But if you’ve outgrown that world and still got to edit and send Office documents now then, you’ve got alternative options.
If you are not able to buy Microsoft Office, here are your best free Office and Microsoft Word Choices for Mac.
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is widely known because of the best open-source alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. this suggests it’s completely free and available on a number of platforms. It’s far and away one among the simplest Microsoft Office alternatives for Mac.
If you’re wont to the Microsoft Office interface (pre-Ribbon era), it won’t take you long to regulate LibreOffice. Unlike Google’s apps, the LibreOffice suite comes with fully-featured offline desktop apps with all the professional features you expect.
LibreOffice recently added a web segment. So you will sync files from Google Drive or OneDrive and edit them right in LibreOffice (there’s no collaboration feature, though).
LibreOffice also does an honest job with regard to formatting when importing Microsoft Office documents. Even complex Excel spreadsheets imported into LibreOffice Calc work as they ought to.
LibreOffice grew out of OpenOffice, which wont to be the de facto alternative to Microsoft Office. But OpenOffice has not noticed any meaningful updates newly, and its management is considering retiring the project. So we advise you to remain far away from OpenOffice. Conversely, LibreOffice’s diary within the recent past has been great.
Embrace Markdown
Here’s a thought purely out of the left field. If you’ve got given up Windows and are embracing the Mac platform, you want to have started appreciating macOS’s simplicity by now. If you would like more of that for creating and editing plain text documents, you ought to try using Markdown.
Markdown may be a syntax like HTML, but it’s much simpler. once you use a Markdown app to write down, you do not stray in dozens of menu options. All the formatting happens using shortcodes.
So for instance, to form a word italic, you wrap it with asterisks.
You can create a posh formatted document without ever moving your hands far away from the keyboard. Plus, Markdown exports clean HTML, and you’ll generate beautiful PDFs using apps like Ulysses.
Office Online
When nothing else will do, just open Office.com. It basically gives you access to free Office for Mac. Office Online is Microsoft-free and basic Microsoft Office service that runs into any browser.
While the feature set is restricted, the fundamentals of document editing, spreadsheet formulas, and presentation options are all covered. you will get access to Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for free of charge.
Edit Office Documents in Dropbox
Dropbox’s partnership with Microsoft means you’ll open a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document shared with you on Dropbox. you do not need an Office 365 license, but you’ll require a free Microsoft account.
Using this feature opens your document in Office Online
If Required, Do Microsoft Office Without Paying for It
Buying the newest version of Microsoft Office will cost you a couple of hundred dollars (or a subscription for Microsoft 365). Most of the time, the choices listed above will suffice for you.
Google Docs works as an excellent alternative to Word, and therefore the same goes for Sheets and Excel. If you are looking for offline alternatives, LibreOffice should be quite enough.
But there could be times where you have got to use Office for a specific task or for a limited period. during this case, you will be ready to devour an inexpensive Office license, you will learn for Mac for free of charge.