I am attempting to find out if it is possible to convert Microsoft Word and Excel documents to Apple's Pages and Numbers. I have all of my documents and spreadsheets in Microsoft programs, but would like to be able to use Pages and Numbers without having to recreate all of my documents and spreadsheets.
Thanks, Miki
MacBook Pro with Retina display, macOS Mojave (10.14.1)
You can open your Word and Excel files in Pages and Numbers. The Apple applications are not clones of their Microsoft counterparts, and many features/functionality in the respective Microsoft applications/documents are simply not available in Pages and Numbers.
When you open the Microsoft Word and Excel files, they are translated into Page's and Number's internal document format — without modifying the original Microsoft documents. Any edits to the .pages or .numbers documents after the translation finishes are retained in the respective Apple documents, and not applied to the original Word or Excel document.
The exportation of Word or Excel documents from Pages or Numbers is again an approximate translation from Apple's internal document formats, and may not appear the same in the exported Microsoft documents due to features unique to Apple's applications, or limitations of the export process itself.
With Word and Excel documents, you are not restricted to one application's ability to open them. With Pages and Numbers, you are restricted not only to these Apple applications, but very likely the version of these applications that created them.
You can open your Word and Excel files in Pages and Numbers. The Apple applications are not clones of their Microsoft counterparts, and many features/functionality in the respective Microsoft applications/documents are simply not available in Pages and Numbers.
When you open the Microsoft Word and Excel files, they are translated into Page's and Number's internal document format — without modifying the original Microsoft documents. Any edits to the .pages or .numbers documents after the translation finishes are retained in the respective Apple documents, and not applied to the original Word or Excel document.
The exportation of Word or Excel documents from Pages or Numbers is again an approximate translation from Apple's internal document formats, and may not appear the same in the exported Microsoft documents due to features unique to Apple's applications, or limitations of the export process itself.
With Word and Excel documents, you are not restricted to one application's ability to open them. With Pages and Numbers, you are restricted not only to these Apple applications, but very likely the version of these applications that created them.
You should be able to just open Microsoft files without issue.
In the last five years, there have been some document backward compatibility issues, but none involving a minor forward update (e.g. Pages v7.2 -> v7.3). I can tell you that each new release of Pages "knows" what past versions of Pages its documents are intended to be compatible with, and this will progress as new versions of Pages are released.
It is impossible to predict what future changes that the Apple Pages product team will introduce in either the application, or document architecture that may interfere with backwards compatibility. Sufficient to say that features unique to a specific Pages version and later, that do not exist in prior versions, may cause the older version of Pages to fail to open that particular document.
This is a huge contrast to the Word and Excel respective .docx/.xlsx formats.
So, to clarify what your response is for my understanding, if I create a doc in Pages, Version 7.2, it won't be usable in a future version of Pages, say 7.3, etc.?
Thank you,
Miki
Converting Word & Excel docs to Pages & Numbers
