what is the mac equivalent of microsoft office

The simplest and most reliable solution is to use MS Word. An example of the first case would be when someone sends me a Word doc that they want me to edit/fill out before sending it back to them. An example of the second case would be when I want to type up a quick document that is going to contain some academic references, but I can't be bothered setting up a BibTeX file for those references, so I elect to type up the whole thing in Mellel instead and have it and Bookends handle my references.

That said, there are times when I'm either forced to use a word processor or it offers the path of least resistance. The whole lack of a separation between formatting and content is really bothersome, and results in head-scratchers like 'Ok, so it doesn't look like I'm in 'bulleted list' mode anymore, but why is the next paragraph I'm typing indented as if it were a bulleted list, and why doesn't switching to other styles (e.g., body) get rid of this stupid indent.' I like to be able to look at the underlying code that I'm using to control formatting so that there is no confusion or ambiguity hence my love for LaTeX and Markdown. I really don't like word processors in general. I also looked at LibreOffice, which does do line numbers in its word processing program, but the line numbers move around when the files are opened in MS Word in my experience. None of us have the expensive Adobe software to edit PDFs, so that's not going to work either. You can send PDFs to preserve formatting, but then they can't edit the files. Formatting is very important in these files that I share, so I need Office to be able to work smoothly with the Windows ecosystem. You can export to Microsoft Office file formats from Apple's suite, but the conversion isn't perfect and that can be a problem. The second is that I have to share files with coworkers who use Windows. So I'll be willing to try if it does what I need.Ģ. I even spent time figuring out how to do things in Numbers that I do in Excel, to help a Mac-using friend at work who doesn't have Office. If Apple adds line numbers into Pages, I'd be willing to give it a shot. Even if I was willing to spend the time to learn Apple's suite, there's one feature in Word that I need for my job which Pages doesn't do: line numbers. I was already familiar with Office, so I bought Office 2011 for the Mac instead of buying Apple's suite which I wasn't familiar with.Īs I used Office more, I slowly learned more of its features and I don't know how to do many of the things in Apple's suite that I use in Office.

The first is familiarity and inertia: when I moved over from Windows to the Mac in 2012, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote weren't free at the time. I use Microsoft Office on my Mac for two main reasons:ġ.

What is the mac equivalent of microsoft office