How do I get MICROSOFT WORD for MAC?

sylvio_quadros wrote:
Hi, I'm a first-time Mac user having problems with this text app in macintosh -- I really would like to know where I can find (and download) MICROSOFT WORD on the internet. Do I always have to download the whole Office?

yes. Word is not available as a standalone product.

I just wanna have m'a old Word back -- miss it.

If somebody could help me pointing out the best site I can download it;

micorsoft site
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Office2008/default.mspx

can I do it for free??

no. it's a commercial program. you can try it for free for 30 days but after that you have to pay.

Thanks a lot,
Sylvio (Brazil)

I really would like to know where I can find (and download) MICROSOFT WORD on the internet.

MS does not offer it for download.

can I do it for free??

Of course not. Office/Word must be purchased.

Use NeoOffice or OpenOffice if you want a Word compatible application.

You cannot download Microsoft Word for free. Microsoft Word is a commercial product; it is not free. Do not be fooled by any site offering it to you free, as it's probably one of the rare bits of Mac malware (something called a trojan horse, malicious software pretending to be something else).

There are some alternatives. TextEdit is already on your machine and does very basic word processing. There are also some free Office clones, such as [OpenOffice|http://www.openoffice.org>. Also check to see if you bought a machine with iWork pre-installed, as the Pages app is a very nice word processor. (You'd have paid extra for iWork when you bought the machine, but check to make sure.)

If you are a student, you may be eligible for academic pricing through your university. If budgeting is an issue, you may be able to acquire a copy of Microsoft Office for 2004 at a substantial discount.

Or just get a copy of pages from Apple. I have both Office 2008 and Pages and prefer pages. I only bought office to be compatible at work and then found pages did everything I needed and could save as Word anyway.

I second that... I only use Word these days when absolutely necessary. When my old copy of Word 2004 eventually quits working, I'll probably just pick up OpenOffice and start using it on those rare occasions, rather than buying a newer copy of Word.

V.K. wrote:

Word is not available as a standalone product.

That's not true. Microsoft shows that you can get it separately from many sources, including Amazon. However, Office is a better buy, especially since you can get the home/student version for $150 USD.

I agree with Thomas OpenOffice is free and has much of the same functionality of MS Office.

http://www.openoffice.org/

I think you are a bit of out of date. In these days, we use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. If you like MacOS, you might like to try Pages, it's better than Microsoft Word. Once you go Pages, you never go back.

Hi syvio_quadros;

I would like to express my concurrence with the other poster that suggested Pages.

So far the only problem I have run into, if you can call it a problem, has been that some of my documents with both graphics and text were not able to be saved as Word formatted documents because Word was not capable of doing what I had done in Pages. I had to send my documents to the PC users in PDF format because of that.

Give Pages a shot and you will totally give up on Word.

Allan

Mauricette wrote:
I think you are a bit of out of date. In these days, we use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. If you like MacOS, you might like to try Pages, it's better than Microsoft Word. Once you go Pages, you never go back.

Wow. That's a pretty sure statement. I can only assume the "we" you speak of is the minority of users who don't go with MS Office. As for "never going back" after Pages, I find it to be little better than Word. Both are "fluff" word processors and don't hold up well against more powerful editors (Mellel, for instance).

To be sure, Pages is a good program, but it's Apple's answer to Word, so it tends to fail in its own unique ways. Though it may be better than Word (a highly subjective statement with which more than a few (myself included) disagree) it still leaves someone who really has to live by the written word in more or less the same limbo that Word did.

I think the bottom line is that the OP asked about Word and expressed a certain level of comfort with Microsoft's offering. It could be because a business environment where Word compatibility is critical (pages is NOT 100% compatible with Word, and even if it's 99%, the 1% can matter if a job is on the line), or perhaps it's a simple love with ease-of-us features such as the right-click thesaurus that Pages still refuses to implement. Who knows? But I think the fact that the answer to the OP's post was the one person who made no mention of OpenOffice or Pages is a sign of the type of help that was being sought.