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Upgrading to Catalina. Problem is that I use MS Office.
Mainly Excel, but also Word and PowerPoint.
I don’t particularly want to pay for Office 365.
if I go with the corresponding Apple products, how much trouble
will I have?
Will I be able to import my existing MS-compatible data files?
How about saving as MS-compatible files to send to someone else?
Mac mini, macOS 10.14
In addition to the Office 365 subscription option there is also still an option for a standalone purchase. See: https://products.office.com/en-us/buy/compare-microsoft-office-products-for-mac?ms.officeurl=mac-compare-redir
Or if you have an early version of Office for Mac 2016, you can update it at no charge. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/troubleshoot/administration/office-2016-for-mac-64-bit-upgrade
Other options include:
The free Microsoft Office on the web: https://products.office.com/en-us/free-office-online-for-the-web
Or Google Docs: https://www.google.com/docs/about/
Or the free and very good Libre Office https://www.libreoffice.org/
or (my last choice) Apple's Pages and Numbers
In addition to the Office 365 subscription option there is also still an option for a standalone purchase. See: https://products.office.com/en-us/buy/compare-microsoft-office-products-for-mac?ms.officeurl=mac-compare-redir
Or if you have an early version of Office for Mac 2016, you can update it at no charge. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/troubleshoot/administration/office-2016-for-mac-64-bit-upgrade
Other options include:
The free Microsoft Office on the web: https://products.office.com/en-us/free-office-online-for-the-web
Or Google Docs: https://www.google.com/docs/about/
Or the free and very good Libre Office https://www.libreoffice.org/
or (my last choice) Apple's Pages and Numbers
Apple does not make clones of Word, Excel, or Powerpoint, or even comes close to addressing the features in those MS applications with Pages, Numbers, or Keynote. When you open any MS file in one of these applications, it is translated into Apple's proprietary document format. The original MS document remains unchanged. You can export back to the respective MS document formats, but that is a translation too, and Apple does not guarantee these translations will be accurate. This can lead to issues when sharing documents with other MS Office users.
If this is only for you, Office 2019 is your best bet for both price, and to ensure compatibility with your existing Office documents and those you need to send/receive with other users. Like Office 2016, 2011, 2008, etc., Office 2019 is a one-time cost perpetual license. It will work for as long as it takes a future release of macOS to break it.
If you need to install Office on even only two computers (and with 365, that can be up to any six computers you want [Mac, Windows, iOS]), the subscription version is cheaper.
The $99 per year fee for six computers is a far better value than getting individual licenses for Office 2019. When you figure a perpetual license release is going to happen roughly every three years (per MS' history), $300 over three years is much, much less expensive.
If you were to purchase six Home version editions of Office 2019 (the one without Outlook) at $150 per license, it would be $900. For the Home and Business edition with Outlook, it would be a whopping $1,500! Then you'd spend that again about three years from now if you always get the latest release when they become available. Even installing Office 365 for only two devices is cheaper than the perpetual license Business edition.
Rumor, too, is Office 2019 may be the last perpetual license version.
I have an Office 365 subscription. I'm using OneDrive for my online storage. It's 99 Euro per year for it and it includes Office.
So 1 tb of cloud storage and Office installations on my MacBook Air, Windows 10 laptop and my Android phone. Bargain price really :) I basically pay for the online storage and use Office for free this way.
Can't hurt to try, but it's only reliable at opening simple Office docs. Anything complex (read: Office only features) cannot be displayed as expected. Sometimes, can't be opened at all. Also, for users who rely on Outlook, there is no substitute for it in LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
I prefer the Apple productivity apps to Microsoft's. They're much more intuitive to me. Office is a bloated behemoth of useless features. I have never needed any of the special features to do what I need to do.
Numbers may not have all of the same functions that are built into Excel, so that may not be sufficient for your needs.
As already mentioned, if you need to send files to people in Office format, the exported versions may not look the same as you created in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote.
In addition to the excellent advice given here, before deciding anything, you can try using the Apple apps and the Open Office app for a while to see if they are satisfactory, and which one you like. Evaluate and then decide.
Try LibreOffice for Mac (free). It works fine. You can open Word, Excel and PowerPoint docs or save new files as e.g. Word docs to send them to other people
Catalina and MS Office
