Collaborate more effectively

Be sure of worldwide standards with Microsoft’s Office suite

MICROSOFT OFFICE $69.99/year From microsoft.com

Features Create documents, graphs, presentations and spreadsheets, OneDrive cloud storage, Teams for conferencing

While Apple’s productivity apps — Keynote, Pages and Numbers — have improved a lot since their introduction, Microsoft rules the roost when it comes to this stuff. Word, PowerPoint and Excel are the worldwide standard for office use, even if Google Docs is making inroads too.

By using Microsoft Office you’re more or less guaranteeing that your documents can be opened and edited by anyone you choose to send them to.

Microsoft likes you to do everything via an account just like Apple does, so you’ll need to sign up and sign in with your Microsoft ID, though this does get you 1TB of OneDrive storage for your documents, as well as iOS versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel in the form of Office Mobile, which of course syncs with the Mac versions.

The fact that Microsoft Office has been around for so long means it has a depth of features that aren’t matched by other office apps, like macros and a Visual Basic editor. Even if you’re not likely to use those features, the day–to–day things you will need to do like creating spreadsheets, graphs and presentations are all well catered for.

Microsoft Office for Mac has been spruced up in recent years too with a new look so it’s much slicker than the slight afterthought that it used to be. Microsoft also offers a range of business packages that provide user management tools and more advanced security features, as well as remote device management and business development tools.