Feb 20, 2016  My question is: can I safely DELETE my Microsoft account now that I have the apps downloaded and installed? Or is the Microsoft account required to 1) keep using the apps and 2) keep receiving updates? I do not want anything to do with my online Microsoft account, I just want to use Word/Excel and save files locally.

Click to expand.Has more features? Pages is both Word and Publisher, it has more features! I tried designing a lot of newsletters and cards on it and it looked so proffessional. In fact, the next time I'll write a short book, I'll do it on pages since it's a great graphic designer and organizer. What a great app, compared to Word and/or Publisher.

In Word, you can't even make a font 'Light' or 'Semibold' or 'Bold SemiCondensed' or 'SemiExtended'! All you have is Bold, Underlined, Italic and Regular. Because of industry and education demands Microsoft Office had a hell of a head start on iWork and because of this,.doc/.xls/.ppt are the standard formats used almost everywhere. My college bought a ton of iMacs and installed Windows on them. They then purchased Office for Mac and use that primarily. All of my homework/project/assignment submissions also have to be in either pdf or office format.

I still use iWork'09 primarily and use LibreOffice to check the formatting when I export to other formats. 3d matrix screensaver. One word.Compatibility. I bought two copies of Office for Mac in order to use Outlook to communicate with clients.Musicians are not ted. Savvy, and most are using the Windows platform.Unfortunately, Outlook is so full of bugs, now made worse by the latest round of updates that I can't use it. Back to Thunderbird which does work. An expensive, and somewhat useless purchase as I rarely use Excel for anything, and have Pages as my main WP.

Word has many more high end features which I just do not need. I certainly won't buy any more copies for my Macs.

My biggest complaint about Office for the Mac is that it isn't Office. I've used Office programs since Win95/Office95, and have grown in capability and proficiency with each successive iteration of the suite. Finally went Mac about two years ago, bought Office for OS X 2011, what a major kick in the face. Why, could someone please explain, would it be ANY different than Office on Windows? Who thinks this is a good idea? Isn't the idea to blur the lines between the arbitrary detail of which OS you are using and concentrate instead on giving a consistent, seamless user experience in the software suite itself? Seriously, 75% of the controls, menus, widgets, etc.

Are named differently, have different icons, have different locations, really?!? And the programs are slow. In Excel, when you right-click a cell in order to bring up the dialog for cell formatting, prepare to wait 2-3 seconds for it to appear. Enjoy the spinning umbrella in the interim.

On severely lower powered Windows machines, the dialog appears instantaneously. For these reasons, among others, I use OpenOffice on my Mac. I only use the word processor and presentation elements of both packages. I would say Word is better than Pages, but Keynote is far better than Powerpoint. Office has the advantage of compatibility.

I regularly get layout problems when I create a document in Pages, but send it out. It will almost always be viewed in Word, and Pages doesn't fit the same standard in several little ways. Pages also lacks a few things. I have created lots of dense tables in Word, so need to rotate the text 90 degrees in the label fields to make it readable. Pages lacks this feature.

Click to expand.I couldn't disagree more wit the 'terrible' comment. I rather like iWork, especially Keynote. But you are absolutely right about its 'backseat' status, just like many other products being sent to the back of the bus in favor of iOS. And while I use Pages from everything from simple word processing to writing research for publication, I use Word for opening up and scoring papers.