Advertisement I used to be that guy who rolled his eyes at MacBook users, then I bit the bullet and bought an iMac. Just buy a Mac, take a couple of days to settle in and never look back. But for Microsoft Office users, the need to buy Office for Mac again can be a hassle. If you work in the traditional office environment that runs on Excel and Word, you might have to bite the bullet.

But if you’ve outgrown that world and still need to edit and send Office documents every now and then there are alternative options. If you’re not ready to buy Microsoft Office for Mac or run your old While Apple provides Bootcamp, a built-in OS X application for installing Windows on your Mac, virtualization program VMWare Fusion 6 allows users to run Windows without restarting their Mac first., these are your best alternatives. Google Suite If you’re going to let go of the Microsoft world, your best bet is to join the Google alliance. Google,, and are the three alternatives to Microsoft Office, Excel, and PowerPoint. There’s no real alternative to Outlook beyond Gmail, and you can get OneNote on the Mac for free.

Google’s suite is really quite good. It integrates well if you already have a Google account. You’ll be able to add and open an Excel file you received via Gmail in Google Sheets by pressing a button.

You must be a member of an academic organization to qualify for the software discounts offered on this WebStore. You will be required to provide proof of your academic affiliation to register an account on this site. Please note your Office365 student license will expire upon graduation. For the Windows tutorial, click here. Sign into your Office365 account with your Full Sail username (first part of your student email address) here Step 3. You will then be directed to the Full Sail University email login page.

You can easily import Microsoft Office files to work on them, export them once again in Microsoft Office formats to pass them around. And if what you’re doing is fairly basic, and you use fonts and formatting that’s standard these days, you can get away with it. The other party will never find out that you’re not using full-fat Microsoft Office.

In some ways, Google Docs is more powerful than Microsoft Word. There’s an Word-processing for students has long been the domain of Microsoft Word, but the recent release of add-ons is making Google Docs an appealing free option., beautiful templates, there are superior research tools built-in and then there’s Google search capabilities. Plus, there’s the advantage of Google’s cloud prowess. Collaborating with multiple users simultaneously in a document is a pure joy. It’s a little thing but it does wonders for productivity. The entire suite is free and you get 15 GB of storage for free as well. The only problem is that there’s no real desktop app for any of these (you can work offline on documents in Chrome, The downside to cloud-based services and apps is that you always need to be online to use them.

We show you how to take Google Drive offline & what to keep in mind.). Accompanying apps for iPhone and iPad are quite good as well. LibreOffice is widely recognized as the best open source alternative to Microsoft Office suite, which means it’s completely free and available on a whole host of platforms. If you’re used to the Microsoft Office user interface (pre-ribbon era), it won’t take you long to adjust to LibreOffice.

Unlike Google’s apps, LibreOffice suite comes with fully featured offline desktop apps with all the pro features you expect. To make the deal even sweeter, LibreOffice recently added an online component.

So you can sync files from Google Drive or OneDrive and edit then right in LibreOffice (there’s no collaboration feature, though). LibreOffice also does a good job in regards to formatting when importing Microsoft Office documents.

Even complex Excel spreadsheets (like mortgage calculators) imported in LibreOffice Calc work like they should. LibreOffice actually grew out of OpenOffice, which used to be the de facto alternative to Microsoft Office.

Hi, I just installed Parallels 3 with Windows XP on my MBP, but the HD is running out of space. As for the external HD, since this is Parallels 3.0 I would suggest to copy the hard disk image Windows partitions on external drives should work in Parallels Desktop the same as partitions on. Is parallels for the mac just a partition hard drive. Once you partition the hard drive, you cannot adjust the partition size. Compared to Boot Camp, Parallels is a greater strain on your Mac's memory and processing power since both operating systems are running at the same time. Select the hard disk you want to partition from the left side of the app. Click on the “Partition” tab. Specify a name for the new partition, select a filesystem type (Mac OS Extended Journaled is default), and choose a size either by manually entering a capacity or by dragging the slider bar in the partition. Here's how to split your Mac hard drive into multiple partitions or volumes so that you can run more than one OS on your Mac, or divide up your Mac so different users can have their own space. We'll show you how to create a volume in Mojave and High Sierra, how to create a par.

But OpenOffice hasn’t seen any meaningful updates recently and the management is considering retiring the project. So we advise you to OpenOffice is no longer a free Microsoft Office alternative you can count on. We have compiled the four best options for Windows, Linux, and Mac. LibreOffice’s track record in the recent past has been great. You’ve got a new Mac and it’s likely you’re never going back to Windows.