Do i need to buy MS office for my new iMac?

you don't need to as stated numbers and pages can open and edit the ms office files just fine

if you don't care for those apps there is also free libre office which can doo and may look a bit more like ms office than iworks(pages, number...)

if you pref ms office then I think you can purchase it from apples app store

or from ms's site, you can choose to rent it that is called office356 or purchase it that is called office 2019

Absolutely not. There are numerous apps that can use MS Office files: the embedded Apple apps, FreeOffice, LibreOffice and others.

However, if you need perfect compatibility for all things MS Office, you'll need MS Office. The free products do a good job, but none are perfectly and 100% compatible.

The key decision is whether you are sharing MS Office documents with others that are also using MS Office. If true, use MS Office yourself so documents are opened/edited/saved in Office native document formats. The term native means original and not translated, which is what Apple's applications will apply with varying degrees of compatibility.

Apple's applications are not clones of their MS Office counterparts. You can open MS Office documents in them providing there are not too many Microsoft unique features used that the documents cannot be opened and translated into Apple's document formats. The original MS Office documents remain unchanged, and if you want to edit content in Pages and share it, it must undergo another translation back to the MS Office document format.

screentimebug wrote:

can I download it from the MS website in English?

Office and just about every other Mac app are normally always multilingual now, they automatically appear in whatever language you have your OS interface set to.