• Microsoft Word For Apple Mac
• Pages Vs Word For Mac

Mac Pages vs Word: a reader asks…

Hi Chris, I’m in the process of switching from Windows to a Mac. I’ve been using Microsoft Word for a long time now, but am not too happy about having to pay for the program again just to use it on a Mac. My new Mac has this program called Pages which does word processing, can I use that with my Word documents? Are there any ‘gotchas’?

PC & Mac Word Compatibility. Mac computers are known for their user-friendly interfaces and easy-to-access features but PCs are still the dominant computer on the market. Applications such as Microsoft Word are used by far more people than Apple's Pages for word processing. Mac applications do not.

1. I am considering getting pages but wanted to get some opnions which s better: Pages or MS Word for Mac. I already have Mac office 2008 for Mac installed on my 2011 Macbook Pro but I feel Microsoft if out to screw over Mac users cause the software is clear buggy in constrast to my usage on Windows 7 through my parralels Desktop on my Mac.
2. Oct 14, 2013 iWork vs. What is Better for Mac. We will be basically discussing what would be a better option for Mac, iWork or Microsoft Office. Microsoft Word vs. Apple Pages for iPad.
3. Pages vs Word. Posted by u/deleted 2 years. Poems, essays, trying short story. So for me Pages is fine and I have it on my Mac, my iPhone, my iPad, and at iCloud.com so I can review or add to or edit very easily. I find it hilarious that so many here are on Apple because of how invadey Microsoft is but still support Office.
4. Microsoft Apple = Terrible End User Experience I don't know why I expected this program to work smoothly. Turns out, I was never even able to activate Word despite having signed up for 2 Microsoft Office accounts, including payment information. They were 1-month trials, with the full intent of signing up for a year.

One of the really nice thing about moving from a Microsoft Windows PC to a Mac is that your new Mac comes with a whole bunch of programs to do most things you want to do without adding additional software. One of those things is word processing. Apple’s answer to Microsoft Word (part of the Microsoft Office suite of software) is Pages. Pages is a full-featured word processor, but operates a little bit differently than the Word you’re used to.

Apple’s Pages has full import and export functionality for various types of word processing programs including Microsoft Word. You can certainly import a Microsoft Word document into Pages, but there are a few compatibility problems. For a complete list, check out the table at this Apple support website. But in a nutshell, you’ll see issues in these seven areas:

Microsoft Word For Apple Mac

• Fonts: Apple does a good job of choosing the nearest Mac font to whatever font you used in your Word document, but it may not be an exact match.
• Tab settings: Apple will import your tabs into Pages, but they may not look the same and need adjusting.
• Text settings: Apple’s Pages doesn’t support linked text boxes, text effects, or vertical text. If you used WordArt in MS Word, you’ll see the text you used, but not the special WordArt appearance.
• Fancy bullets and numbers for lists: Pages will give you bulleted and numbered lists, but your exact format may not convert over. Also some paragraph styles may look different than the original in MS Word.
• Graphics/Images: Pages supports many types of images, but not everything. And if you used Microsoft’s SmartArt Graphics, that won’t transfer over.
• Tables and Charts: some types of pie and line charts may not look the same when you bring them over, and you can’t import surface or radar charts from MS Word to Pages. And don’t expect your tables to come over cleanly either.
• Misc: page borders and backgrounds in MS Word won’t transfer over, neither will borders and watermarks, equations. And you can’t use Word Macros, they don’t come across. Nor do Word themes, ink annotations, ligatures, and OLE objects. If you’ve an image embedded in a table, the image might not be imported, but you can re-do that in Pages. If you’re a big fan of ‘Track Changes’ you’ll miss that, as well as linked Table of Contents (e.g., Bookmarks). Finally, bibliographies and citations will be imported, but they can’t be managed like you did in MS Word.

Pages Vs Word For Mac

Pages is great when you’re creating documents, once you get to know how it works (it isn’t hard). But it is quite a bit different than Microsoft Word, so you’ll have a bit of a learning curve to get over before you’re comfortable in the Mac world. You’ll see the same types of compatibility issues with Numbers (Apple’s answer to Excel) and Keynote (Apple’s answer to Powerpoint). All these programs work great, but there’s going to be a transition period where it may take you a bit to get comfortable with how these Apple programs do things.

If you routinely work with others and have to deal with Microsoft Word documents, then it might be worth the investment in an Office 365 subscription so you can continue to use Word and not have to deal with compatibility issues.