However, you could get the apps for free when you bought a new Mac computer. Then in 2017, Apple finally made all three apps free on the Mac App Store for Mac, iPad and iPhone. Google contacts for mac labels.

While I have never found a lot of use for Pages for an iOS device, it can be handy for a quick edit or writing when travelling. But I have used Pages documents and Numbers for Mac almost every day now for over ten years on my Apple laptops. The best feature is that because the apps are designed for Mac, they work fast and integrate with other Apple tools. What about Microsoft Office? Yes, I use Pages and Word too. The current version of Office I have installed is Office for Mac 2011 which works with versions up to Mac OS Sierra.

Microsoft Word offers the best of all worlds: enhanced features to create professional-quality documents, easier ways to work together with people, and almost-anywhere access to your files. The free Microsoft Word app provides a core experience for viewing, creating and editing docs on devices with a screen size of 10.1 inches or less. You can get the full Word experience with an Office 365 subscription.

But this version is not supported on Macs using MacOS High Sierra, Mojave or new versions to come. If you want to use Word on a new MacBook Pro, it is going to cost quite a lot of money to upgrade to Office 2016.

I have Word on three Macs. The price to upgrade is very expensive. For a one-time purchase of the software, it will cost over $350.00. For a yearly Office 365 subscription, it will cost me 3 cents short of $180.00. On top of that, I would only use Word and perhaps Excel from time to time and never use the other apps in the suite. So given a choice between $350.00, $180.00 or free, it’s a no-brainer to consider using only the Apple iWork suite to replace the Microsoft Office suite. If you are a Mac user like me and your primary requirement is word processing, can Apple Pages reliably replace Microsoft Word?

The short answer is yes. It’s like having Word for Mac for free. Writing without Word If all you need is a word processor, Mac Pages can handle everything you probably need to do.

Like Word, you can start with a blank document or use the template chooser. The word processing in page layout document view is easy to work with, and all the text formatting, fonts and writing tools are easy to find and use. There is a spell checker, word count and track change with an add comments option. In fact, it is difficult to think of a common function in Word that is not available in Pages documents. However, there are some areas of compatibility, particularly in advanced features of Word and Excel such as macros that you might need to consider.

Unless you are using complex charts and tables, there are really no aspects that would concern an author, content writer or blogger. It’s a word processor, but it has had a lot of stability improvements over the years to make is reliable and robust. After an hour or so of becoming familiar with the menus and options, you will find that it’s very easy to use.

The sidebar menu is intuitive and changes depending on what you are doing. For most users, every tool you need is visible. One big plus with working with Pages is that you never need to do a save, as it saves automatically. Every day tasks like inserting headers and footers, text boxes or adding page numbers are simple. The image galleries make adding and adjusting images quick and easy. This is one area where Pages really shines.

There is a lot more control over images. You can scan a document using an iPad app and then drop your photo or scan into a document. For paperback covers, it is very easy to drop in a high-resolution cover image and export to pdf. One other big plus for Pages for authors is that you can export to epub without the hassle of converting in another program. If you are publishing ebooks, this is a huge time saver.

While there are not a lot of, it is enough to export a perfectly acceptable epub file directly from a word processing document. Great, but what about working with Word files?