Discover the Best Office 365 Invoice Template for Support

Office 365 invoice template for Support

hi this is Gary with macmost.com should you Microsoft Office on your Mac or just use Pages numbers and Keynote [Music] macmost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts so a question I'm often asked and that I often see online is do you need to the Microsoft Office apps on your Mac in particular apps like word excel and PowerPoint the alternative of course is to use Apple's apps Pages numbers and keynote pages in word are both word processors numbers and Excel are both spreadsheet apps and keynote and PowerPoint are both presentation apps but they all do look and work differently so which one should you use you can get Microsoft's apps from the Mac App Store they're all available to download for free but you're going to need a subscription to use them you can choose from a couple different subscription plans from Microsoft site and then in those apps you log in to be able to access your account and then unlock the app there's also the options to do one-time purchase you can still do that from Microsoft but it's going to cost more and of course that's not going to include major updates so at some point in the future you may find that you need to buy a new version to replace the Aging one that you have now the main reason to use Microsoft Office apps is if you're used to them say you've come from the windows world you're now on the Mac and you have years of experience and knowledge for using Microsoft Word and Excel and you don't want to stop using them now and use something new well you can simply use the Mac versions of those and continue on doing things the way that you've always done the Mac versions do look a little bit different they're a little more tuned to the Mac interface but you're going to find it a pretty easy transition to go from the windows version of Word to the Mac version of Word another reason you may want to use Microsoft's apps is that they are without a doubt the most powerful I love the Apple apps and I use the Apple apps myself but there is no doubt that Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel are the most powerful word processor and spreadsheet app on the market they've been around for a long time and they have tons of features packed into them most people of course don't need all of these features and some of them are really obscure and have very specialized uses but there's definitely more features packed into Word and Excel than pages and numbers another reason to stick with Microsoft Office apps is for compatibility if you work with people or collaborate with people that are also using Microsoft Office apps it's much easier to pass the same documents back and forth not converting them all the time back and forth to other formats if that's even just going to save you a little bit of time and frustration it's probably worth the entire price of using the Microsoft Office apps and also another type of compatibility is document compatibility if say you've come from the windows world and you have years and years worth of Microsoft Word doc files and Excel XLS files well then having Microsoft Office around to be able to open those old file files is really useful of course you can open them in pages and numbers as well but there may be compatibility issues it could be nice to have the official Microsoft Office apps there to be able to access all your files without any problems now how about the Apple apps Pages numbers and keynote well the main advantage to those without a doubt is that they're free if you've got a Mac you can Pages numbers and keynote on your Mac just get them from the app store if you don't already have them on your Mac and it doesn't cost you anything in fact even if you have Microsoft Office you should probably have those apps installed anyway they could be useful for some tasks when you don't need all the power that's in the office apps now also I believe that the Mac apps are easier to use for instance take a look at Pages here this is a blank document Pages you've just created a document you're ready to start writing you can see some buttons here at the top you can see controls for things like font and styling here on the right now look at Microsoft Word it definitely looks more complex Maybe he only marginally so though instead of having things on the right everything's here at the top and this is just a portion of the controls you have to switch between these different ribbons here at the top to actually access everything it's really not that different from having the right sidebar there but I think if you really wanted to compare them you would have to come to the conclusion that words more complex which makes sense since it's more powerful the same thing with Excel and numbers here here's Excel and you can see all the different ribbons here at the top and here's numbers you still have a lot of that complexity here in the right sidebar if you even want to have that visible but I think everything looks a lot cleaner and it's a little bit easier to understand as long as you're not already deeply entrenched in Excel of course it's going to be hard to transition from Excel to Numbers but if you haven't really used Excel I think starting in numbers is going to be easier than starting in Excel also keep in mind that with Pages numbers in keynote there are also free versions for the iPhone and iPad so if you have multiple Apple devices and you learn to use Pages say on the Mac you can use some of those skills to actually use pages on your iPhone or your iPad as well and there are no compatibility issues plus of course the Apple apps work really well in the Apple ecosystem for instance if you save a Pages document to iCloud you can go to the share menu here and easily collaborate with other Mac users using Pages it just kind of works seamlessly there's really not too much to learn you're just both working on the same document now that's also true of Microsoft Office apps you can collaborate as long as you save to Microsoft OneDrive if all of your co-workers or collaborators are using Microsoft Office then it may be better to stick with Microsoft Office but if they're not if in fact they're all using Macs then it may be better to collaborate with them using Apple's apps another thing about Pages numbers and keynote is you can still work with Microsoft Office documents so this comes in really handy if you don't necessarily need to work with those documents but you do need to view them so for instance here in pages I could open up a Microsoft Word file no problem and it will simply convert it and it will give me warnings if there's anything that's not compatible but my goal here was just to read the document like say someone in a group I'm in insists on Distributing basic information in Microsoft Word docs you could still open it up in pages to read it and if you ever want to give somebody a document to work on in your own pages and they're using Microsoft Word you can always go to export and then export as word and give them a Word document so now some final advice first you can use both if you pay to have Microsoft Office there's no reason you shouldn't have Pages numbers in keynote also on your Mac in fact I did this for years when I had to work in Microsoft Word for writing computer books that's what my publisher used but I did everything else in Pages matter of fact this is a good strategy if you slowly want to wean yourself off of using Microsoft Office apps you can use Pages for some things word for things that you need to use word for and then as you get more experience with Pages you may find at some point you decide to ditch the office apps in the end the decision's got to be yours and there's no right or wrong answer and you certainly don't have to stick with the same answer you could subscribe to Microsoft Office for a year see how it goes and decide to move completely to Apple apps next year you could just use Apple apps for now and we find out you can't get by working with your colleagues with the Apple apps you can then get Microsoft Office and start using that but I do hope you found this information useful thanks for watching [Music] if you like this video click the Thumbs Up Button below to let me know I publish new tutorials each weekday hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss out