Buy Microsoft Office 2019 for the cheapest price. Microsoft certainly took its time to give us a new standalone Office package as it's moved its focus to the Office 365 subscription service nowadays. You have choices when it comes to choosing Microsoft Office for Mac. You can either select Office 365 Mac, which is a cloud-based subscription service with many collaborative features, or Mac Office 2019, which is a one-time purchase geared more towards personal and small businesses use.
Where once the idea of installing Microsoft software on a Mac would have been unthinkable, now as both companies have adopted a more open stance, and compatibility issues have been ironed out, Office and Office 365 are both viable productivity software option for Mac users.
The latest version of Office software available for the Mac is 'Office for Mac 2016', which was first launched as part of Office 365 in July 2015 under the 365 cloud-based subscription model, and then as a standalone product in September.
At the enterprise level, Microsoft has made it simple for Mac users within an organisation to install Office 2016 for Mac themselves by providing the installer package file. Alternatively IT admins can download the installer package file to the local network and use software distribution tools to deploy Office 2016 for Mac to its users.
If you have an Office 365 plan you can simply direct Mac users to download and install the software and log in using their credentials to get started straight away, as long as they are an admin on the device and you have an available seat as part of your subscription.
So is Office for Mac the best choice for you? Let's break it down...
The benefits:
Familiarity, compatibility and a rich set of features for power users are the main benefits of opting for Office on your Mac. If your office is a Microsoft shop it will probably be easiest to use Office 365 on your Mac, and it is worth asking your IT team if you can you can use the company Office 365 plan.
If this is for personal use then it comes down to personal preference, and desire to pay for the software instead of cheaper alternatives like G Suite or iWork, which integrate with Microsoft formats fine.
The drawbacks:
Price is the primary drawback when it comes to Office software, especially when there are perfectly good free and open source or far cheaper alternatives on the market.
Hardcore users of Excel may also still complain that the product differs slightly on MacOS to Windows.
The alternatives
Apple offers its own suite of office software - Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets and Keynote for presentations, all as part of iWork, which Apple made free for all users in April 2017.
However, if you want to store work in the cloud then Apple will try to push you to save work in its own iCloud, where free storage is pretty stingy with just 5GB, scaling up to £6.99 per month for 2TB. You can sync iWork with cloud file storage providers Dropbox or Box though.
iWork apps have also come a long way in terms of document compatibility, with users now able to open, edit, and save files in standard Office formats as well as: DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, and PPTX, PDF, CSV, and HTML.
Then there is the popular Google office suite - called G Suite - with its stripped down Docs, Sheets and Slides, complete with 32GB of free Drive storage. G Suite starts at £3.30 per month for basic personal use, and £20 per user per month for the enterprise package.
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Read next: G Suite vs Office 365 - What's the best office suite for business?
Pricing
Office 365 Home, which can be installed on one to five PCs or Macs, is charged at £79.99 per year and includes 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage per user. A personal 365 package (1 user) is £59.99 per year.
Alternatively, the Office Home and Student 2016 for Mac software as a standalone download is a one-off payment of £119.99.
For businesses large and small Office 365 is charged on a tiered basis depending on the number of 'seats' or logins required. Business licences start at £3.10 per user per month for the Business Essential package and up to a maximum of 300 users.
See here for a full pricing structure and feature list.
Microsoft released a bunch of new Office for Mac functions in February 2017 for the new Track Pad and Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro.
Anyone lucky enough to have the latest MacBook Pro can now use the Touch Bar to insert photos, hyperlinks, or comments in your document.
For Powerpoint the Touch Bar integrates slide thumbnails so you can move through your presentation, and also includes a timer.
In Excel, pressing the equal sign launches the most recently used commands on the Touch Bar.
Read next: New Microsoft Office 365 Business and Enterprise tiers explained: which one is right for your business?
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Verdict
As a Mac user, I opted for the Apple iWork software suite, mainly based on price. The software itself is native to the Mac, and has that clean Apple design with the sort of functionality anyone brought up on Office products will find familiar.
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I then switched to G Suite due to our office being a subscriber, and find these productivity apps easy to use and conducive to collaboration with my colleagues.
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That being said if our office was a Microsoft shop I see no reason why I wouldn't have settled for that software for the same reasons, despite the fact that I personally prefer the stripped back functionality of the G Suite applications.