Microsoft Office is the best known office suite. Surely we have ever used Word, Excel or PowerPoint, whether at school, at work, or on a personal level. Such is the popularity of this suite that there are many users who do not even know that there are other alternatives far from the hands of Microsoft. And one of them comes from the hand of Apple, iWork, one of Microsoft’s archrivals.
iWork is one of the best alternatives that we can find to Microsoft Office. This suite is quite popular within the Apple ecosystem for a number of reasons. The main one is because it is installed by default, and because if it cannot be downloaded for free from the App Store . However, even if we are Windows users, iWork offers us a series of advantages over the Microsoft suite that makes us seriously think about whether Office is really good or has a long way to go.
iWork is free; Office no
As we have already anticipated, the main advantage that we can find when using this software compared to its rival is that it is a completely free suite. It has no fine print, no limited features, no micropayments, and no subscriptions. Nothing. Apple allows us to use this suite for free regardless of the operating system we use.
If we are macOS users, we can download iWork for free from the App Store. Otherwise, we will have to use the web version of iCloud to be able to work with this suite. But always for free.
Choose which programs you want to download
If we have installed Office on our computer, we will have noticed everything that it installs without wanting to. In the case of wanting to use only Word we will find that, by force, we have to install Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other programs. Apple distributes iWork in separate programs from the App Store. Therefore, we can download and install only the ones we need.
Also, these programs are significantly lighter than Microsoft’s.
iWork is compatible with Word, Excel and PowerPoint
Are you working with other people who use the Microsoft suite? No problem. Apple has worked very hard to provide us with full support for Microsoft document formats . Thus, we will be able to open any DOCX, XLSX and the like without problems and work with them as if they were native programs. We will even be able to save the documents we create in Pages or any of the other programs in this suite in Microsoft format. And we can open them with Word, Excel or PowerPoint without any problem.
Very clean and simple interface
We cannot say that Office is complicated to use. The Ribbon interface, so criticized by many, allows us to have all the options and tools of each of the programs at hand. It is very intuitive to use. However, Apple’s is more so.
The interface of the iWork programs is much clearer and simpler . We will have at our fingertips the functions that 95% of users need to avoid wasting time searching through tools and functions that we will rarely need. This does not mean that the programs in this suite are simple, but that the advanced options, less used, are elsewhere.
Cloud sync and collaboration
If something characterizes Apple, it is for having a superb ecosystem. Everything we do from this suite we can have it synchronized at the moment not only with the cloud (iCloud, of course), but with all the other devices that we have linked to our Apple account.
In addition, the iWork suite has a large number of collaborative options that will allow us to share documents directly with other people to invite them to edit, in real time, the document we are working on.