Best free Office suite for OS X?

Question

Best free Office suite for OS X?

What is the best free Office-style software for Mac OS 10.9?

I used to have NeoOffice, but they seem to charge for that these days and I'm not willing to pay. So what are some good free alternatives?

I need it to be able to open and save to Microsoft Office files (such as .doc) and contents looks the same when transferred from one and the other, but otherwise I'm not after anything especially elaborate, just something that works smoothly on OS 10.9, nothing buggy or resource intensive and nothing that will cause problems with other software.

I've got Pages (and Numbers), and although they're fine for most things, I'm looking for something a little better; specifically a word processor that allows me to use other fonts I have installed.

I appreciate all recommendations.

Mac mini (Late 2012), OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Aug 29, 2015 10:13 AM

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Answer 1

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Csound1

Level 9

59,973 points

Aug 29, 2015 10:14 AM in response to Little Endian

LibreOffice

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Answer 2

Aug 29, 2015 11:07 AM in response to Little Endian

FWIW, Pages and Numbers both allow font selection; I've just checked, and the add-on fonts are present and available.

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Answer 3

Aug 29, 2015 12:21 PM in response to Little Endian

If you want exact Word compatibility with Word in MS Office, then you should use Office for Mac 2011 (fully updated) on Mavericks, or Office 2016 for Mac (better Word 2013 compatibility) on Yosemite. It is the only way that you can work in Word documents natively and have reliable, accurate results.

The next best thing is LibreOffice v5. It is a superset MS Office replacement suite, and LibreOffice Writer will open Word documents, edit them in Open Document Format, and can save them in Word 2007/2010/2013 format. You can tell it to always save in Word format in the Writer preferences. However, as it does not work on Word documents in their native format, some translation, and inaccuracies may occur. That is the price for choosing free, non-MS Word software. Don't over look the LibreOffice PDF manuals here. They were written with LibreOffice Writer.

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