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MS Office and Pages/Numbers

This is long, sorry. I am replacing my old (2007) iMac with a Macbook Air. When I first got the iMac, I was working and using a PC. To lessen the learning curve, I bought Office for Mac. Flash forward to now and I have a lot of Word and Excel docs I still want to use. I am unclear if I will be able to open Office docs on the Air without purchasing the MS product? I plan to bite the bullet and learn pages and numbers. I want to be able to use and probably convert Office to MAC platform. So, I will open the Word doc and do what I need to do to save in Pages.


Thank You, Nancy W

MacBook Air

Posted on May 22, 2019 9:19 AM

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Posted on May 22, 2019 11:01 AM

You can use Pages to open Microsoft Word documents and Numbers to open Excel documents. They may not convert exactly.


If you don't want to buy or subscribe to Microsoft Office, another option you may want to consider is the free Libre Office which is very good and much closer to the Microsoft programs than Pages and Numbers. https://www.libreoffice.org/


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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 22, 2019 11:01 AM in response to mabel_309

You can use Pages to open Microsoft Word documents and Numbers to open Excel documents. They may not convert exactly.


If you don't want to buy or subscribe to Microsoft Office, another option you may want to consider is the free Libre Office which is very good and much closer to the Microsoft programs than Pages and Numbers. https://www.libreoffice.org/


May 22, 2019 11:11 AM in response to mabel_309

Nancy,


Just because you own a Mac, does not mean that you are required, or trapped into using Apple document formats. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint document formats can be opened by many different applications on multiple platforms, but Apple's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote document formats can only be opened on the Mac platform by these same applications.


Apple's applications are not MS Office application clones, so features that you have used in past Word documents, that Pages, Numbers, or Keynote do not know how to translate into Pages, Numbers, or Keynote features will be dropped. Any font references in those old Office documents that are not actually installed on macOS will either get converted to Times, or throw an error and not be replaced at all.


The advantage of using MS Office (Office365/Office 2016 for Mac/Office 2019 for Mac) is that you open the documents natively in their own formats, and can edit and save them without document translation issues on opening them, or exporting them — as you would have with Apple's applications.


There is the free LibreOffice (presently 6.2.4) that is a superset of MS Office that has the best Microsoft document compatibility outside of Microsoft Office. It too has a learning curve, and unlike Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, there are lengthy PDF user guides to ease the learning process. These user guides were all written in LibreOffice Writer.


The real strength in the Apple applications is the support they receive here in the Apple Support Communities from fellow users, though Microsoft as their own communities for their Office Suite applications.

MS Office and Pages/Numbers

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