Alternatives to Microsoft Office for a Mac

Most users rely on some type of word processing program.

Microsoft Office for Mac is a software suite that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, which is called Entourage in pre-2010 versions. It contains programs that most users rely on; word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and email software. Despite the fact that Microsoft has a virtual stranglehold on the productivity suite market, it's not "Microsoft or nothing" if you work on a Mac; several non-Microsoft alternatives are available for Mac users.

AppleWorks

AppleWorks contains word processing and spreadsheet programs, two of the elements found in Office. AppleWorks was alternately sold or given away for free over the years by Apple and it still enjoys popularity among anti-Microsoft users. Unfortunately, the components of AppleWorks were never as feature-rich as its Microsoft counterparts and the filters that allowed you to convert your documents to Word and Excel were buggy at best, so it never was a serious threat to Office. However, used on a stand-alone basis, AppleWorks delivers strong word processing and spreadsheet capabilities, and also contains a database, drawing and painting functionality. AppleWorks was discontinued in 2007, and the final version released was 6.2.9.

iWork

Apple produces iWork, a package that competes with Microsoft Office.

Apple posed a much more serious threat to Microsoft with the 2005 release of iWork, which contains Pages, a word processing application, Keynote, a presentation program and Numbers, a spreadsheet. All of these are much more sophisticated than the programs found in AppleWorks. The package has gone through several revisions since its inception, and the current version at the time of publication is iWork '09. Although Apple considers it a successor to AppleWorks, iWork does not contain any drawing or database functionality.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a free, web-based suite of programs that pose a more serious threat to Microsoft than Apple's products. It offers word processing, spreadsheet and presentation functionality along with up to 1 GB of document storage on the cloud. Google Docs was created to help facilitate collaboration between users, no matter where in the world they're currently working.

OpenOffice.org

Google Docs and OpenOffice.org are free software suites.

OpenOffice.org offers word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics and database software. Due to all the components, it is the one that most closely resembles AppleWorks. It is available as free download (download.openoffice.org/other.html) and versions are available for Mac, Windows, OS/2, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris, along with other more obscure operating systems.

References

• Apple: iWork
• Google Docs
• OpenOffice.org

Resources

• OpenOffice.org: Download
• AppleWorks Support