Have a MacBook Pro 2017. To use Apple products like Pages, etc and Microsoft office Word, etc, do I need to purchase a Microsoft subscription? Or can I use Apple and import and export different format documents without buying Microsoft? I pay nothing extra for Apple word processing programs; I don't want to pay $100/year for Microsoft word processing.
MacBook Pro
It all depends on whether you are, or are not exchanging Microsoft format documents with other Microsoft Office users. If you are sharing, especially in a corporate environment, then you should be using a supported version of Office for the Mac: 1) Microsoft 365 (subscription), or Office 2019 for Mac (single-purchase). The reason is that the documents that you create/edit/save all remain in the native Microsoft document format.
The free LibreOffice Suite can open Microsoft documents and save them, but it is a superset that is implemented differently and there are features in it that may not have Microsoft Office counterparts.
Apple's counterpart applications (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) are not clones of their Microsoft applications whose documents they open and perform a document translation on opening, and exporting (no save option) Microsoft Office documents. Thus, the native document format is never preserved or changed, and the input and outputs may not look like the original Microsoft document, and you may find yourself lit up in corporate environments when what you share is a train wreck from the expected content.
Microsoft only presently supports the subscription Microsoft 365 applications, or the single-purchase Office 2019 for Mac on Mojave, Catalina, or Big Sur. All other prior releases are retired and unsupported.
It all depends on whether you are, or are not exchanging Microsoft format documents with other Microsoft Office users. If you are sharing, especially in a corporate environment, then you should be using a supported version of Office for the Mac: 1) Microsoft 365 (subscription), or Office 2019 for Mac (single-purchase). The reason is that the documents that you create/edit/save all remain in the native Microsoft document format.
The free LibreOffice Suite can open Microsoft documents and save them, but it is a superset that is implemented differently and there are features in it that may not have Microsoft Office counterparts.
Apple's counterpart applications (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) are not clones of their Microsoft applications whose documents they open and perform a document translation on opening, and exporting (no save option) Microsoft Office documents. Thus, the native document format is never preserved or changed, and the input and outputs may not look like the original Microsoft document, and you may find yourself lit up in corporate environments when what you share is a train wreck from the expected content.
Microsoft only presently supports the subscription Microsoft 365 applications, or the single-purchase Office 2019 for Mac on Mojave, Catalina, or Big Sur. All other prior releases are retired and unsupported.
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote can read/open Microsoft Office files and can also save in MS-Office formats (Word, Excel, Powerpoint). There may be a few options or formats that don't come through perfectly when doing these conversions, but for basic use, they work well.
There are other low cost or free options, such as LibreOffice.
If you want or need the full functionality of the MS-Office products, probably the best approach is to license MS-Office 365. I have a family plan license for 6 users, $99/year, which is pretty good on a per user basis., just $17/user per year. For a single user it is $69/year. You are kept fully up to date plus you get Outlook and some other programs plus 6 TB of storage (family plan; 1 TB for single user license).
Alternatively, you can purchase Office Home/Student for $150 one-time payment but you get a lower level version of just Word/Excel/Powerpoint and no cloud storage.
So you have several options that are zero cost, as well as others that range from one time $150 payment to $69/year for one user ($99/year 6 users).
Microsoft Office
