Advertisement I used to be that guy who rolled his eyes at MacBook users, then I bit the bullet and bought an iMac. Just buy a Mac, take a couple of days to settle in and never look back.

But for Microsoft Office users, the need to buy Office for Mac again can be a hassle. If you work in the traditional office environment that runs on Excel and Word, you might have to bite the bullet.

Category: Office Suites. Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 offers a solid update to the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the other members of the productivity suite. Though the latest package is still not on par with the Windows version.

But if you’ve outgrown that world and still need to edit and send Office documents every now and then there are alternative options. If you’re not ready to buy Microsoft Office for Mac or run your old While Apple provides Bootcamp, a built-in OS X application for installing Windows on your Mac, virtualization program VMWare Fusion 6 allows users to run Windows without restarting their Mac first., these are your best alternatives. Google Suite If you’re going to let go of the Microsoft world, your best bet is to join the Google alliance. Google,, and are the three alternatives to Microsoft Office, Excel, and PowerPoint. There’s no real alternative to Outlook beyond Gmail, and you can get OneNote on the Mac for free. Google’s suite is really quite good. It integrates well if you already have a Google account.

You’ll be able to add and open an Excel file you received via Gmail in Google Sheets by pressing a button. You can easily import Microsoft Office files to work on them, export them once again in Microsoft Office formats to pass them around. And if what you’re doing is fairly basic, and you use fonts and formatting that’s standard these days, you can get away with it.

The other party will never find out that you’re not using full-fat Microsoft Office. In some ways, Google Docs is more powerful than Microsoft Word. There’s an Word-processing for students has long been the domain of Microsoft Word, but the recent release of add-ons is making Google Docs an appealing free option., beautiful templates, there are superior research tools built-in and then there’s Google search capabilities.

Just like Pixelmator, Acorn 5 challenges the notion that you need to spend hundreds of dollars or pay out a monthly subscription for access to a powerful image editor. Image editor on mac.

Plus, there’s the advantage of Google’s cloud prowess. Collaborating with multiple users simultaneously in a document is a pure joy. It’s a little thing but it does wonders for productivity. The entire suite is free and you get 15 GB of storage for free as well. The only problem is that there’s no real desktop app for any of these (you can work offline on documents in Chrome, The downside to cloud-based services and apps is that you always need to be online to use them. We show you how to take Google Drive offline & what to keep in mind.). Accompanying apps for iPhone and iPad are quite good as well.

LibreOffice is widely recognized as the best open source alternative to Microsoft Office suite, which means it’s completely free and available on a whole host of platforms. If you’re used to the Microsoft Office user interface (pre-ribbon era), it won’t take you long to adjust to LibreOffice. Unlike Google’s apps, LibreOffice suite comes with fully featured offline desktop apps with all the pro features you expect. To make the deal even sweeter, LibreOffice recently added an online component. So you can sync files from Google Drive or OneDrive and edit then right in LibreOffice (there’s no collaboration feature, though). LibreOffice also does a good job in regards to formatting when importing Microsoft Office documents. Even complex Excel spreadsheets (like mortgage calculators) imported in LibreOffice Calc work like they should.

LibreOffice actually grew out of OpenOffice, which used to be the de facto alternative to Microsoft Office. But OpenOffice hasn’t seen any meaningful updates recently and the management is considering retiring the project. So we advise you to OpenOffice is no longer a free Microsoft Office alternative you can count on. We have compiled the four best options for Windows, Linux, and Mac. LibreOffice’s track record in the recent past has been great. You’ve got a new Mac and it’s likely you’re never going back to Windows. Included with your Mac was the iWork Suite:,, and. These are Apple’s own alternatives to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.