Microsoft Word, one of the most popular programs to create, view, edit, share, and manage Word documents, is available for your Mac device. With a simple and clean interface, the program lets you manage everything easily and quickly. Whether you’re a student, journalist, blogger, columnist, writer, or project manager, you'll find Microsoft Word will be an excellent choice.
Create and collaborate in real-time!
Designed for Mac, it’s all you need to manage Word documents.
For those who are concerned that the design may look unfamiliar from the original Windows version, you can count that the transition from one platform to the next will be smooth and intuitive. Simple and clean interface. Among the most popular word processing programs for Mac, Microsoft Word has the cleanest interface.
Microsoft Word is one of the most popular word processing applications worldwide. It is the go-to app for document creation and management. While you’ll find several word processing apps on the App Store, Microsoft Word is the better choice for all its robust and advanced features.
Using the program, you can conveniently spell check, insert pictures, merge data from MS Excel spreadsheets, display charts, and choose from several embedded objects. One of the most important characteristics of Microsoft Word is the WYSIWYG interface. It instantly matches the text on screen with the final output on the page.
For those who are concerned that the design may look unfamiliar from the original Windows version, you can count that the transition from one platform to the next will be smooth and intuitive.
Simple and clean interface
Among the most popular word processing programs for Mac, Microsoft Word has the cleanest interface. In fact, it’s supported by the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, making it easier to work on lengthy documents. Since Word also supports the revamped macOS Mojave Dark Mode, it allows you to eliminate distractions while working on important documents throughout the day.
Rich feature list and formats
Word for Mac comes with a wide range of pre-designed templates so you can start working instantly on projects, blogs, assignments, scripts, letters, notes, and CVs. With several layout options and rich formatting to express your thoughts and ideas, it’s the best program for document editing. Unlike its competitors LibreOffice and Pages, Microsoft Word retains the pristine layout and aesthetics on all devices.
Reduced errors with intuitive tools
Microsoft Word is packaged with several intuitive tools to help you with editing and proofreading. While using Word, you won't need tools like Grammarly, since the program gives grammar, spelling, and stylistic writing suggestions as you type. With numerous tools available, you can switch among pen, paper, and digital inking conveniently.
Real-time collaboration for project management
With its real-time collaboration features, Microsoft Word takes the lead. Office 365 gives you the ability to work on the Cloud and ensure seamless integration among several apps. With just a single click, you'll be able to share your documents with anyone, anywhere.
By the same token, anyone who opens the document will be able to add comments or edit in real time.
Easy sharing options
While most word processing programs provide you with easy sharing options, Microsoft Word goes a step ahead. With just a few clicks, you can give each person a different kind of access and permission.
In general, a main problem with sharing options in other programs is the distortion of formatting in email messages. However, when you copy the content from your Microsoft Word document to an email message, there’s no distortion. You can even attach and share documents over email without worrying about the recipient receiving error messages or misrepresented formatting.
Where can you run this program?
Microsoft Word for Mac is available both as part of the Microsoft Office 365 package and as a standalone app. Both options will require you to purchase an Office 365 subscription. Microsoft Word for Mac is compatible with Mac OS 10.12 and above.
Is there a better alternative?
While Microsoft Word is a good choice for Mac, you might want to consider a few alternatives. The Mac OS already has a good word processor called Pages. It offers some great collaboration features and lets you export files to Word format. However, exchanging documents with people who work on Word can be tedious. Moreover, the app doesn’t have advanced features, such as master documents and mail merges.
If you’re considering an alternative for Microsoft Word, Google Docs will be your best bet. In fact, Google Drive offers Docs, Sheets, and Slides, which together become the perfect alternative for the entire Office suite. The only drawback is that Mac doesn’t support a desktop app for these programs. When you can’t find a good option, it’s best to settle with Office.com. It gives you free Microsoft Office for Mac. Office.com is Microsoft’s basic and free browser-based service.
Our take
While Microsoft Word is synonymous with Microsoft Windows, most people don’t know that it was first released on the Mac. Though both companies have shared a constant rocky relationship, Microsoft Word has always been a mainstay on Mac devices. With ample features, clean interface, and rich formatting, Word is still a viable option for creating, editing, and managing documents on Mac.
Should you download it?
Yes, without a doubt! Microsoft Word is an excellent word processing app backed by one of the most trusted companies in the world. Over the years, updates have introduced several new features, including integration with Office 365.
14.4.1
Word on the Macintosh is basically Word for Windows re-compiled to run on the Mac. It's not just 'compatible'. It's not just 'like' Word for the PC. It is Microsoft Word, the same one Microsoft makes for every platform. However:
The cost and number of person-hours spent developing Word is mind-boggling. It's well over a billion dollars, and there are well over ten thousand person-years of effort in it. Making a new one just for the Mac would have been so expensive that a copy of Word would cost several thousand dollars. You might buy two at that price, but the rest of us couldn't afford it!
Because it is the same software, and Microsoft has a policy of bringing the two versions closer together, the differences will become less over time. Essentially, each version on the PC is matched a year later by a version on the Mac (Microsoft is trying to reduce that gap, recently the Mac Business Unit became part of the main Office Business Unit that makes Office for every platform).
Same File Formats Used in Mac and PC
Mac Office MVP Jim Gordon writes: 'The Microsoft Office file format Open XML (OOXML) is for Word, Excel and PowerPoint files and used on both the Mac and the PC. The file format was accepted by an international standards body. Office 2010 for Windows with service pack 2 or later and Office 2011 for Mac comply strictly with the standard. Office 2008 for Mac and 2007 and 2010 for Windows prior to service pack 2 comply about 98% of the way to the standard (there's a very minor exception in Excel).
'Microsoft also ships a set of fonts with the same names on both Microsoft Office for Mac and PC. The fonts distributed with Mac Office have been very carefully adjusted ('hinted') so documents on the Mac will look and orint the same way as documents using the PC versions of those fonts on the PC. The differences are tiny, but they account for the differences in the way the Mac places pixels on the screen.
'As for having documents be identical when moving from one computer to another there are factors you must consider. This is true PC to PC, PC to Mac, Mac to Mac, and Mac to PC. Microsoft Word is a word processor that has text that flows, unlike a PDF or page layout program. Any difference in font or printer driver from one machine to another has the potential to affect spacing, breaks, window & orphans, paragraphs, etc. To repeat - these changes have nothing to do with Mac to PC, rather they are caused by computer to computer differences.
'Your documents should look the same on the Mac as long as ALL of these conditions are met:
The behavior of Word is identical on the two platforms, provided the above conditions are met, if you want your documents to look alike when moving from one computer to another - regardless of platform. It's the fonts, file formats and printer drivers that are the sticky points when moving a document from one computer to another regardless of platform.'
Rules of Thumb
Having said all this:
Differences in Appearance
On each platform, Word adopts the default appearance of the Operating System. There is almost nothing that you see on the screen that is drawn by Word: on the Mac, the display is created by Mac OS; on the PC, by Windows. It saves money and it saves vast amounts of disk space and processor power.
The only difference you are likely to notice is that if you are in OS X, the window controls are on the opposite side to Windows.
Different Keystrokes
On the Mac the Command (Apple) key is the Control Key in Windows, whereas the Control Key from the Mac is the Right-Click in Windows.
On a Windows keyboard, the Control key is always labeled Ctrl. On a Mac keyboard, expect to find the ⌘ or ? symbol on the Command key. (These characters will not display on the PC; they should look like this:.) This paragraph is a classic example of the cross-platform font difficulties you will experience. There is no default font common to the PC and the Mac that contains both of those characters (in case you are interested, that's 'Lucida Grande', the most wide-ranging of the Mac OS X Unicode fonts).
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Word is very right-click-centric. If you do not have a two-button mouse, you will find it is a very worthwhile investment if you are going to spend much time in Word.
The Control-Click (or Right-Click) brings up the 'context menu' wherever you happen to be. In Word almost everything you want to do, or everything you want to know, will appear on the right-click. The menus that appear vary dramatically depending on where your mouse-pointer is.
Word also responds to the scroll-wheel if you have one. (Not all windows; for example preferences and options dialogs do not...). Mouse scroll wheel support in Word pre-X depends totally on the mouse drivers. Microsoft drivers for the Microsoft Mouse generally work (and will often drive other companies' mice!).
In Windows, the keyboard shortcuts are listed in the Help, in a topic surprisingly enough called 'keyword shortcuts'. On the Mac, only some of the keystrokes are listed, in various topics such as 'About using shortcut keys' and 'Select text and graphics'. To find the list on either platform, use Search from the Microsoft Office Help to look for the word 'keyboard'.
You can look at the Key Assignments by using Tools>Customize>Keyboard on either platform. If you select a command, and it has a key assignment, the Customize dialog will tell you what it is. This is a better place to look than the Help, because users can (and should) change their keystrokes to suit themselves on either platform. The Customize dialog also includes a handy Reset button if you decide you do not like the keystrokes you inherited from the previous user on that computer.
Finally, each version of Word enables you to print a list of the currently-assigned keystrokes so you can stick them on the wall. To print them on the Mac:
You do it exactly the same way in Windows, or see here for a more extensive pre-built list.
Macbook Version Of Word
One keystroke that will catch you out a few times is Command + h. Ctrl + h in Windows is the shortcut for the Replace dialog. On Mac OS X, Command + h hides the application! Use Command + Shift + H for the Replace dialog on OS X.
With OS X, Apple changed some of the keystrokes reserved for the operating system and added some new ones. On each version of Mac OS, Word follows system convention.
Some Mac keyboards do not have a Forward Delete key. Word needs one: there is a difference in Word between Forward Delete and Back Delete. You will strike it most often in tables: in a Table, Delete becomes 'Clear' which removes the cell contents without removing the cells. Use Cut to delete the cells themselves. Back Delete will remove text within a cell but has no effect if more than one cell is selected. If you are on a Mac laptop, the Forward Delete key is probably Function + Delete.
The Mac has an Option Key, Windows does not have an equivalent. Generally what you expect from the Option key will be on the Control Key in Windows.
Three very commonly-used shortcuts are Command + c (Copy), Command + v (Paste), and Command + s (Save). On Windows these are Ctrl + v, Ctrl + c, and Ctrl + s.
A keystroke that may catch you out a few times is Clear Formatting: on the PC it's Ctrl + q to restore paragraph formatting to that of the underlying style, and Ctrl + Space Bar to restore character (font) formatting. On Mac OS 9, they are the same. On Mac OS X, these are Command + Option + q and Ctrl + Space Bar.
Later versions of Word have an Edit>Clear>Formats command on the Menu bar, which will save you trying to remember the other two. However, note that Clear>Formats resets the formatting back to the formatting of Normal Style (it applies Normal Style) whereas the individual commands simply reset a paragraph to the formatting of the current style.
Different Menus
One thing that will catch you out all the time is that on the Mac, Word adopts the Mac convention of having a Preferences command. In OS X it's on the Application (Word) menu, in OS 9 it's on the Edit menu, again, following the OS convention. On the PC, this is Tools>Options on the Tools menu. It's the same thing, the tabs are exactly the same inside.
Word on the Mac still has a Work menu you can put on your menu bar; this has been replaced by the Task Pane (which is nowhere near as convenient) in later versions of PC Word.
Mac Word also has a Font menu which the PC lacks.
Ipad Equivalent Of Microsoft WordDifferent Print Mechanism
In order to display a document in WYSIWYG mode, Word needs to know a lot about the capabilities of the printer the document will eventually be sent to.
In Windows this is very simple: Word reads all the information it needs from the printer driver for the printer set as the Windows default. On the Mac, it attempts to do the same thing, but the mechanism is vastly more complex. Look here for more detail.
Some Features Didn't Make it
Making software is a depressingly manual activity. Every line of code has to be planned, typed, and checked. There are more than 30 million of them in Microsoft Office. There simply was not enough time and money to bring all the features of PC Word across to the Mac. And some of them we wouldn't want, anyway! Most of the omissions are of interest only to solution developers:
Fonts Can be a Problem
On the PC, you can use characters with impunity: if the PC does not have the font, it will find the closest font that contains the character. On the Mac, in Word 2004 and above, you can use the exact same range of characters because Word 2004 is running in Unicode; however, because you cannot embed the font in the document, you need to make sure that each character that you use exists in one or more of the Unicode fonts your recipient has. If in doubt, for PC compatibility, use only the fonts that Microsoft supplies.
Microsoft includes a pack of fonts with Mac Office that have been very carefully hinted to display and print the same on the Mac as the same-named fonts do on the PC. Although the Mac can happily use PC fonts, the rendering of those may be subtly different, particularly on the high-res Mac displays.
Jim Gordon reports that he has no problems at all with the following list of fonts:
Arial
Calibri
Cambria
Candara
Consolas
Constantia
Corbel
Times New Roman
Verdana
Meiryo
Jim says 'Office for Mac has a very nice feature to make font compatibility a cinch. When you choose a font using the Home tab of the Ribbon, the first item in the list is Font Collections. The easy way to ensure compatibility is to choose fonts from the Windows Office Compatible font collection submenu.
'If you have company specific fonts they must be installed onto each Mac in order for Mac Word to use them. There is no work-around to the restrictions John mentioned. Fonts embedded by Windows Word are ignored.
'I haven't had problems with cross-platform differences with our HP, Epson, and Lanier printer drivers, but we do test for differences before purchasing so that we don't run into such problems.
While there's no interface on Mac Word to make Font Themes and Color Themes (you can do it in PowerPoint, or with VBA), Themes made on PCs will work on a Mac.
The Advanced Typography settings you can apply in Mac Word will display in Windows Word, but there's no Advanced Typography interface in Word for Windows, so you have to use Mac Word for this feature.
VBA a Level BehindWhat Is Word For Mac
The VBA level in Mac Word is markedly less capable than in PC Word: around the level of Word 2003 but with missing bits.
Visual Basic for Applications on the Mac is at version 6 (on the PC, this is Word 2000 level of VBA); Word 2013 on the PC is at version 7. Code you write on the Mac will run on the PC if you are careful. Expect code you write on the PC in Word 2000 or above to generate compile- or run-time errors on the Mac.
Active-X controls will not work on Macs. 'Legacy' controls will work. Some of the latest controls from 2103 won't work on a Mac.
Developers should read George Clark's article for more detail.
ActiveX is not supported on the Mac at all. If you create userforms, use only the controls provided in the Forms Toolbar on the Mac, anything else you bring from the PC will generate an error when the user opens the document.
Digital Signatures are not supported on the Mac, and neither is code signing. You will not be able to open a signed project in Mac Word. If the signature prevents you from changing a macro, the code will be execute-only on the Mac.
AppleScript is not available on the PC. VBA is very powerful: investigate scripting your application from AppleScript with VBA, using the 'Do Visual Basic' command.
Macbook Version Of Word
The VBA Integrated Development Environment is severely cut back on the Mac. If you plan to develop much VBA, invest in a copy of Virtual PC: the productivity you gain is enormous. Hint: Use Windows 7 and NTFS disk format.
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