MacBook Pro Mac Compatibility Issues
- Thread starter Gil
- Start date
Preview (pre-installed on your MacBook Pro) is capable of opening MS Office documents, but not editing them.
In order to edit those documents, you'll need to install either the MS Office apps themselves, or software capable of opening and editing their documents, such as Apple's suite (Pages, Numbers, or Keynote), or LibreOffice for Mac.
I like Apple's home-grown apps like Keynote, Pages, etc. But it's still a Windows/Microsoft world in which we live, and I consider Office for Mac to be an indispensable suite of programs. Nothing else comes close, and I've tried everything. The real rub with other apps is cross-platform compatibility. Get Office for Mac and you'll be happy you did. The Home/Student edition is all you need as it includes Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Those are the big three. Outlook sucks IMHO - no unified inbox! Not even the option for a unified inbox. Geez, even BlackBerry offered that in 2005.
I agree getting the Office for Mac is a good idea,i use the free Kingsoft Writer on my Windows computers but it's not available for the Mac. I wonder why? Because it's FREE could that have anything to do with it.
As an old time cheapskate I'd ditched MS for office type tasks long before I went to iMac from PC/Windows. I went to Open Office from (at that time) Sun microsystems, which then led to Oracle, then an outfit called Apache, all without significant changes when updates were/are done... It s worth investigating. Research 'Open Office.org. - only hiccup I've had was at first it wouldn't download. In order to get O/O ( and a few other 3rd party apps) to download I'd had to open up ( in preferences-security) to allow downloads beyond items from the Mac App Store, to include 'known developers' years ago. Now even that wasn't good enough, after the El Capitan Update as O/O has changed hands so may times it's now offered by an 'unknown developer' ( it was gifted to a university I believe) so I had to 'wide open' the download permissions, which worked, then as soon as the application was installed and running, close my security to Mac Apps and known developers..... Its probably not for everyone but worth having a try, as the price is right and it does work fairly well...
I'm familliar with that office suite. It's supposed to be quite solid, but I don't't speak from experience. I think I only downloaded to "check it out" then got rid of it. I'm comfortable and happy with Apple's office suite of apps, so I don't really have a need for it.
By the way, it's called LibreOffice now, and it's developed by The Document Foundation.
One can find and download it here.
The suite includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program resembling Microsoft PowerPoint, a vector graphics editor, a database management program, and an application for creating and editing mathematical formulae.
