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The role of Microsoft Office on Mac is essential. When Bill Gates appeared on video at WWDC many years ago to commit to new versions of Office for Mac, the Mac with a robust Office program was a critical part of the company’s growth Apple. While competing with Google Workspace and the Google Drive ecosystem, iWork is Apple’s free option alongside Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. These platforms are good but are simply part of a company’s broader product portfolio. What if there was an option for a business that just wants to build great productivity apps? This is what I found with OfficeSuite.
About Apple @Work: Bradley Chambers managed an enterprise IT network from 2009 to 2021. With his experience deploying and managing firewalls, switches, mobile device management system, Wi-Fi enterprise grade, thousands of Macs and thousands of iPads, Bradley will highlight the ways Apple IT leaders deploy Apple devices, build networks to support them, train users, IT management stories and ways Apple could improve its products for IT services.
Over the years, any software platform has experienced some expansion. New features are added in addition to other features. The menus are extended. Code is overlaid on code. That’s just the reality of how software works. That’s what I immediately thought when I started working with OfficeSuite for Mac. It has a robust word processor and is an easy-to-use spreadsheet. It natively supports Microsoft file formats, so it’s easy to edit them back and forth. In some ways, this sounds like what iWork should look like to be a direct competitor to Microsoft Office.
On the PC side, OfficeSuite offers everything you need to quit Office (Slides, Mail, etc.). On the Mac and iOS side, they started with just Word and Excel competitors, which I thought was a great place to start. The team said both the PDF tool and the PowerPoint competitor would be available in the future.
Nikolay Kussovski, Business Line Manager for OfficeSuite, said: “OfficeSuite was created to enable users and businesses to work on their own terms. Simply put, our school of thought is the freedom to be productive on any device or platform. Every user around the world should have access to free office document editing.
Main features of OfficeSuite:
- Work with common file types like .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlxs, etc.
- 5 GB of free cloud space in MobiDrive
- More than 15 languages supported.
Who benefits from this use?
Many people end up using their email provider’s productivity suite (Microsoft, Google, etc.). I think sometimes it’s a bad model because it may not be the test productivity suite. By disconnecting your email from your productivity suite, you are free to choose the best one. OfficeSuite covers all the basic features that 99% of users will need in Word and Excel, but in a much better user interface. The apps are blazing fast on iOS and macOS. Like I said earlier, they feel a lot more like Pages and Numbers should feel if they were trying to be direct competitors to Office (which I’m not sure about).
If you want a much more basic productivity suite than Microsoft 365 but want more than what Apple offers, OfficeSuite is a great option. I much prefer native apps to web apps, so this is a big win over Google Workspace for me. A license also covers use on macOS, PC and iOS.
Overall, I like it. If you work on many documents simultaneously that don’t require editing with someone on the same file, this is a much easier-to-use alternative to the Office suite.
You can learn more about OfficeSuite on their website.
Apple @ Work is brought to you by Kolide by 1Password, the device trust solution that ensures that if a device isn’t secure, it can’t access your apps. Close the Zero Trust Access Gap for Okta. Learn more or watch the demo.
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