Mac Office Suites

Find out which toolkit is best for you

Your choice of office suite used to be a no–brainer. Anyone who strayed from Microsoft Office was at risk of their spreadsheets and documents being unreadable by anyone but themselves, but no longer. Microsoft’s own formats are as close to an industry standard as we’re going to get, so even if you’re not working with them natively — you’re using iWork or Google Docs, perhaps — you can import, export, and share confidently.

Microsoft is still the default choice in the workplace, but when iWork is so good and, like LibreOffice, completely free, it makes sense for Mac users to consider the alternatives. Conversely, as iWork ships with every new iPad and Mac, it’s almost too easy for Apple users to use it from day one without ever considering that something else might better suit their needs. That would be a mistake.

A good office suite should help you do your work more efficiently, in a way that recognizes the fact we live in a more connected world than ever before. It’s imperative we can share files without suffering any formatting glitches and, increasingly, that we can work with colleagues on the same document simultaneously — not by having everyone cluster around the same screen, but remotely through a browser or native apps.

In this group test, we’ll be using Microsoft Office, iWork, LibreOffice, and Google’s browser–based productivity apps. Our goal is to judge which performs best across four stringent tests, each of which is designed to simulate everyday life in the small office or home — both online and off — and find out whether the only suite out of the four that costs money is worth the asking price.