MacHeist has MS Office 2019 Home and Business for $29.97. I would eventually like to get the new one that comes out in 2024.
Should I go for the 2019 now and stick with it?
JoyWarp – an odd name but very reliable – has it for even less ($22.95): https://www.joywarp.com/product/office-2019-home-and-business-lifetime-license-key-for-macos/
Non-MS apps (like Apple’s, or Open Office, or others) being able to open MS documents is a convenience when you’re primarily working with the app’s native document format, since it lets you easily import content.
But to use these apps for working with MS documents (e.g. when collaborating with others who are using MS Office) is usually a bad idea. Unless you limit yourself to only the most basic features, you will find that not every MS feature is supported, some of your app’s native features aren’t supported by MS, and many common features aren’t implemented in exactly the same way. The result can be far more aggravation than it’s worth.
Not to mention the time and effort to re-train yourself. I’ve been using MS Office for a very very long time. Any other app, no matter how good, is going to have a steep learning curve. You need to decide if the price of MS Office is worth all the effort needed to switch suites and develop enough expertise to be productive with it. For me, it just isn’t worth it.
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@davbro Your link leads to a Google search with a completely different lic key supplier, are you sure this is “reliable”?
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@mHm Sorry – not sure how that happened.
Here is a link I got from entering the site URL in Safari, then clicking on the product description on the home page.
https://www.joywarp.com/product/office-2019-home-and-business-lifetime-license-key-for-macos/
Point that no one has mentioned—365 gives one a TB of cloud storage for its yearly subscription—that’s not an unspeakable price. Thus I think of the applications, Word, Excel & Outlook etc, as freebies!
365 is unquestionably the one to go for!
(Just my 2¢ 
)
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For seventy bucks a year Microsoft 365 Personal is not a bad deal. You get the most up to date versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote and few other extras, plus you get one TB of online storage. You can use on up to 5 different devices with the single license.
It all depends on your usage.
As @janesprando wrote above, she only has one computer. So a perpetual license (especially at a discounted price) will cost less in the long run. And a lot of people have no need for a lot of OneDrive storage or Teams or other other apps.
I think we’ve probably hashed this question to completion now.
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I VERY HIGHLY recommend that before you pay for a copy of Microsoft Office, that you try this amazing FREE product:
FreeOffice (free)
https://www.freeoffice.com/en/
FreeOffice is a really slick clone of Microsoft Office, and is extremely similar. Unlike products like Apple’s Pages and LibreOffice, FreeOffice offers excellent compatibility with Microsoft format files, both opening them and saving in the Microsoft format! It may suit your needs perfectly, and you can’t beat the price.
I’ve installed FreeOffice for some clients and they can’t tell the difference between it and Microsoft Office!
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Randy, I will try a test document and see if my editors have any problems with it. Thanks.
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I’d love to hear how things go.
My own experience was that I had been following the development of the OpenOffice siblings (NeoOffice, LibreOffice, and Apache OpenOffice) closely for YEARS. I know that everyone in my user group was anxiously awaiting the day when they could cast aside Microsoft Office and go with one of the OpenOffice siblings instead, as a viable alternative. It never happened. Even after many years of development, the OpenOffice programs never reached a high level of compatibility with Microsoft Office-format files. They all got tripped up by complex formatting. None of them, for instance, could perfectly render my pleading template for California.
When I first heard about FreeOffice (not based on OpenOffice, by the way), I was very skeptical. I downloaded it and used it to open my pleading template. What I saw literally caused me to gasp. My pleading template rendered PERFECTLY! FreeOffice was the first program that I’ve tried, other than Microsoft Office itself, that could do that.
Note that it isn’t all puppies and rainbows. FreeOffice doesn’t have the huge number of esoteric features that MS Office has. It uses a different macro language, and is different than Office in a number of other ways. So it really depends on what you use Office for whether or not FreeOffice can be a viable replacement. But I’ve found that many people are perfectly happy with FreeOffice.
If FreeOffice isn’t perfect for your needs, it might still be worthwhile. Personally, I have genuine Microsoft Office on my home and business iMacs. But I have FreeOffice on my laptops and on the machines of most of my staff. I’m a power user of MS Office, but I don’t need all that power on my laptops, working away from the office, and neither do most of my office staff. A free copy of FreeOffice on all of my Macs that don’t really need it, instead of MS Office, adds up to quite a bit of savings. Savings that I especially enjoy because I didn’t pay them to Microsoft.
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Thanks for the interesting post, Randy. I had completely forgotten about FreeOffice! I did some work with a German company quite a few years ago that was investigating the paid version, SoftMaker Office, as an alternative for some of its machines.
Regarding formatting, I’m curious about how well FreeOffice does on machines that don’t already have Microsoft’s default fonts on them, e.g., Aptos, Calibri, Cambria, etc. Unless it is smart enough to substitute fonts with the same metrics as the Microsoft fonts, I’d imagine there could be pagination issues, even if the rest of the formatting is handled perfectly.
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Well, I downloaded it and figured out which is Word and which is Excel. Yay me!
But it looks like there is a bit of learning curve to create a document close to Word so that my articles are accepted. I’ll have to create some "tests"and see how it goes.
Any tips, Randy?
I did have to use Windows at two jobs, and MS Access and Publisher were absolutely total horror shows. They couldn’t hold a candle to FileMaker or Pages. And Pages is free.
However, I’m not a fan of Apple’s Numbers. I really prefer Excel, especially when doing spreadsheets.
Thanks for the interesting post, Randy. I had completely forgotten about FreeOffice! I did some work with a German company quite a few years ago that was investigating the paid version, SoftMaker Office, as an alternative for some of its machines.
To my knowledge, none of the extra features in SoftMaker Office are necessary features. They are just nice to have.
On the other hand, usually a week after you download FreeOffice, they will send you and e-mail offer to purchase SoftMaker Office at a price that is pretty hard to say no to. It might be worth purchasing the full commercial version just to support SoftMaker, in hopes that they thrive and keep on updating FreeOffice.
Regarding formatting, I’m curious about how well FreeOffice does on machines that don’t already have Microsoft’s default fonts on them, e.g., Aptos, Calibri, Cambria, etc. Unless it is smart enough to substitute fonts with the same metrics as the Microsoft fonts, I’d imagine there could be pagination issues, even if the rest of the formatting is handled perfectly.
If you are going to be exchanging files cross-platform, then you do indeed have to be using the exact same fonts on both platforms, because the font metrics on the Mac and Windows are slightly different. If you don’t use the same exact fonts, some cleanup of the formatting will be necessary when exchanging documents.
If you are extremely well acquainted with Word, then it shouldn’t take you more than a day or so to become proficient using FreeOffice/TextMaker to the same effect. FreeOffice doesn’t try to hide anything.
I don’t know of any video tutorials for FreeOffice. But the FreeOffice manuals are here:
Why not give a try to LibreOffice or (red it’s even better): SoftMaker FreeOffice 2024
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FreeOffice is not going to work. The editors said it is too much work for them to fit MS Word —- that’s the format they publish with. So I am going to order Office 2019 for $22.xx. Thank you all for the suggestions. This has been a good topic and sharing ideas.
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I’m curious. FreeOffice allows saving to .docx format. That didn’t work for your editor? Did the export garble the contents or just not work?
She didn’t explain why it didn’t work, but only that I was causing HER to spend time adjusting my words to fit MS Word. Could be the document arrived garbled or something else. For $23 (for MS Office 2019) it isn’t worth my time, either, to stress and worry that my articles won’t be accepted.