Overview of Office Suites
| Apple iWork suite |
Google Workspace suite |
Microsoft Office apps1 |
LibreOffice ex. of Open Source |
Notes | |
| Cost | Free, std install on every macOS, iOS and iPadOS -device | At cost, get license from Google | At cost, get license from Microsoft | Free | |
| OS: macOS support | Yes (SA+Web) | Yes (Web) | Yes (SA+Web) | Yes (SA) | |
| OS: MS Windows support | Yes (Web only) | Yes (Web) | Yes (SA+Web) | Yes (SA) | |
| OS: Linux support | Yes (Web only) | Yes (Web) | Yes (SA+Web) | Yes (SA) | |
| Rt: Standalone apps | Yes (macOS & iOS only) | No…2 | Yes (the ‘SA’) | Yes | |
| Rt: Web-based | Yes (the ‘Web’) | Yes (the ‘Web’) | Yes (the ‘Web’) | No | |
| Word processing app | Pages | Docs (Web) | MS Word | Writer | |
| Spreadsheet app | Numbers | Sheets (Web) | MS Excel | Calc | |
| Presentation app | Keynote | Slides (Web) | MS PowerPoint | Impress | |
| more | OneNote OneDrive Outlook Teams |
Draw Base Math Charts |
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| Cloud drive service | iCloud | Google Drive | OneDrive | No | (Our Search section has some more on cloud file services) |
Legend:
OS: Which operating systems are support, what OSs you can use office suite on. Standalone application(s) (‘SA’) and/or Web-based (in web browser).
Rt: Runtime – here refer to if there is a standalone application variant (that is then downloaded and running locally, desktop) or web-based with a client-server architecture (web-browser being a (more or less thin) client).
1) MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint is primary focus here. There are other applications in different MS Office Suite packages of which some are also working on other platforms than MS Windows.
2) No standalone applications can be a lot bigger issue for some users than than others, for a few different reasons:
* Not necessary heavy office apps (‘Word/Excel/PowerPoint’) users but anyone that is writing documents, doing calculations / retrieving data in spreadsheets, maybe also working on presentation(s) at the same time, and getting information from various web-based resources, thus continuously jumping in between applications (command-tab and command-shift-tab on macOS, alt-tab and alt-shift-tab on MS Windows, and correspondingly in Linux).
Very different workflow, process, or jumping between apps versus jumping in between many different web browser windows!
* Degree and easiness of working off-line, without access to Internet – both documents and software (like Docs, Sheets, and Slides from Google)
- Apple
- Microsoft
- office.com/
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office
- google.com/search?q=ms+office
- Office 2011 – requires 32-bit macOS, 10.13 is the best last possible (10.14 also supports but is crazy with warnings)
- Office 2016 – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2016
- Office 2019 – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2019
- Open Source
- General /common
Spreadsheets Offline / Online
| Standard Use | Web browser > Dropbox shared link | ||
| Excel file, on desktop | Full R/W using Excel app. 100% formatting e tc. |
View | |