Microsoft's game plan, from Office to Xbox to Windows 10, is to get users to think of its products as services, and to subscribe rather than to pay one time. There will be casualties of this strategy. This week Microsoft released Office 2016 for Windows and Mac (following ), and now comes the reckoning of what you get if you buy the suite outright, versus what you get if you opt for Office 365, which requires a monthly or annual fee. If you prefer to pay for Microsoft Office once and use it for several years before upgrading to a new version, you're going to find a lot of limitations.

1. Can I Just Buy Powerpoint For Mac Free
2. Can I Just Buy Powerpoint For Macbook

No free trial First, the most obvious absence is a free trial. Whereas Office 2013, no such option exists for the standalone version of Office 2016. If you want to give this new suite a trial run, Office 365 is now your only option. No mobile or cross-platform Microsoft does a lot to sweeten the Office 365 option. Only 365 throws in a version for tablets and mobile phones. The standalone suite's lack of mobile access to Word and Excel stings, given how much more popular mobile computing has become since the previous version of Office came out in early 2013. Similarly, if you want Windows and Mac versions of Office, you must buy them separately, whereas the 365 subscription includes both.

Can I Just Buy Powerpoint For Mac Free

With 365 you choose between a 1-user license for $70 per year (or $7 per month) or a 5-user license for $100 per year (or $10 per month). In addition to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, Office 365 unlocks Outlook, Publisher, and Access at every subscription level. How to find the standalone Office suite and apps If you want the full standalone suite, you'll have to hunt for it. If you go to the product comparison page, you are not shown the standalone versions that offer Outlook, Publisher, and Access; you'll see only the Home & Student SKU for $150. To see the other two versions, you have to scroll down to the Resources section and click the See Options link under Compare All Options.

Then you'll find the $230 version that adds Outlook and the $400 edition that also gets you Publisher and Access. Even at these steep prices, the license is limited to one user. However, you may be able to save money if you want just one or two of the Office apps.

Feb 12, 2015 - Just as I was warming up to choosing a Microsoft Office 365. Use Office apps on traditional Windows or Mac computers or Windows tablets, such as the Surface Pro 3. Excel for spreadsheets, PowerPoint for presentations, Outlook for. You can buy Office for personal computers and Windows tablets the. Can I just buy Product Key and than download Office for Mac 2011 in language I need, because my Country doesn't have local site? My country doesn't have regional website, so is it possibe to purchase Product Key only and than download Office for Mac 2011 in the language of my choice form download site - Office for Mac 2011 Download Site?

This website apparently has exactly 56,574 free PowerPoint templates! They have a huge number of categories that you can browse through or you can search by tags or specific colors. In addition, they have a separate section just for PowerPoint backgrounds, in case that is all you are looking for.

Can I Just Buy Powerpoint For Macbook

To find them, don't bother looking on Office.com; go to Microsoft's online store, where you'll find. So, for example, if you need Word 2016 and Access 2016 and nothing else, you can pay $220 instead of forking over $400 for the standalone version of Office 2016 that bundles Access. The individual programs are still limited to one user per license. Also, be aware that the paid apps are downloads only; you cannot currently buy them on disc. However, if you need to reinstall the suite or one of its apps later on, you'll be able to retrieve the necessary files by with your Microsoft account username and password.

If you don't have an Microsoft account, Microsoft can help you create one the first time you install Office. If you have an account for OneDrive, Xbox Live, Skype, Hotmail, or MSN, then you already have a Microsoft account and can use that login. Here are the direct links to the purchase pages for the downloadable versions of Office 2016's apps:.

Skype and OneNote limits Some exclusions or reductions are understandable. The standalone version does not give you 60 free minutes of Skype per month, and the bundled OneDrive storage (Microsoft's competitor to Google Drive and Dropbox) is reduced from 1TB to 15GB. These services cost money to operate, so it makes sense for Microsoft to charge a periodic fee for them. Should you subscribe or go free? Given Microsoft's stark limitations on the standalone license (particularly the lack of multi-user licenses), Office users may look to free options. If you can make do with streamlined, cut-down Office apps, Microsoft that have roughly the same amount of functionality as Google Docs.

These apps are dependent upon a constant connection to the Internet, and the files created on Office.com are stored in your OneDrive account, which you can access from Office 365 and the standalone versions of Office 2016 and Office 2013. You might also be tempted to switch to or, free alternatives that have made great strides in recent months. Both can create and read documents that use Microsoft Office's file formats. Before you spend more money on Office, it's worth giving these apps a spin and testing their compatibility with your Office documents and spreadsheets. More resources.

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 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. 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.

Included with your Mac was the iWork Suite:, and. These are Apple’s own alternatives to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. As these are Mac apps, the UI is quite different. Instead of being top heavy, the options show up in a contextual menu on the side. And you just won’t have as many options as the Microsoft Office suite. All three apps are now quite mature and all the basics are covered. Once you get used to them, they’re actually a joy to use (something I can’t necessarily say about Microsoft Office).

While customization options are limited, everything that’s available is quite polished. When you create a presentation in Keynote, chances are you’ll end up creating something beautiful. The same goes with Pages, and moving text, images, and graphs around is a seamless experience that doesn’t make you want to pull your hair out. The iWork Suite lets you import and export documents in Microsoft Office formats (it will save to the default iWork format, though). And as long as you don’t use a Mac specific font, doing a back-and-forth with Office documents shouldn’t be a big problem.

IWork also has online collaboration options but frankly, I wouldn’t recommend using them. They’re nowhere near as reliable as Google’s offering. Quip isn’t a fully featured alternative to Microsoft Office. But if you were never comfortable with Word or Excel, Quip’s minimal approach to document editing might just be for you. It’s what I personally use as a Word alternative. In Quip, there are no ugly, complicated menus to worry about.

Formatting happens using shortcodes (kind of like Markdown, but not entirely). A formatting bar shows up when you select text. Common shortcuts are also supported.

Quip also shines when it comes to collaboration. While it’s not as feature rich as Google Docs, Quip’s multi-user editing and comment features are still quite good. Quip’s iOS app lets you edit documents on the go. Quip’s default themes will help you generate beautiful PDF documents. When nothing else will do, just open Office.com. Office Online is Microsoft’s free and basic Microsoft Office service that works online. While the feature set is limited, the basics of document editing, spreadsheet formulas, and presentation options are all covered.

You’ll get access to Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Edit Office Documents in Dropbox Dropbox’s partnership with Microsoft means you can open a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document shared with you on Dropbox. You don’t need an Office 365 license but you’ll require a free Microsoft account. Ditch PowerPoint for Better Online Tools, sure but it’s quite outdated.

If you want to stand out with your presentations,:. — This is my personal favorite for creating beautiful presentations easily. The free account lets you create and present documents online. To export, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid account. — This service is geared more towards startups but the visual tools offered by Prezi are beyond anything you can get with PowerPoint.

— Canva is an online image editor but it has an extensive library of presentation templates. Plus, Canva gives you all the important tools for creating a customized presentation. Embrace Markdown Here’s an idea purely out of left field. You’ve given up Windows and embraced the Mac. You must have started appreciating macOS’s simplicity by now. If you want more of that for creating and editing plain text documents, you should try using Markdown.

Tired of HTML and WYSIWYG editors? Then Markdown is the answer for you no matter who you are., like HTML but much simpler. When you use a Markdown app to write, there are no 25 menu options. All the formatting happens using shortcodes.

So for example, to make a word italic, you wrap it around with asterisks. You can create a complex formatted document without ever lifting your finger from the keyboard. Plus Markdown exports clean HTML and you can generate beautiful PDFs In 2016, not everyone needs a full-service word processing program, which is why software like Ulysses exists.

If You Must, Stick With Microsoft Office 2016 Microsoft Office 2016 is here and it's time for you to make a decision. The productivity question is - should you upgrade? We give you the new features and the fresher reasons to help you.

For Mac was a significant one. There’s UI and feature parity with the Windows version.

If none of the above alternatives work out for you (I would again suggest you give LibreOffice a good hard look), you might have to drop $229.99 for (or a $9.99 per month subscription). How do you use Microsoft Office documents on your Mac? What kind of productivity features you just can’t live without? Share with us in the comments below. Explore more about:,.