Moving away from Microsoft Word

Software
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I have been using Microsoft Word for the past many years due to a subscription from work.

That subscription has now expired and I want to shift to Pages, Keynote and Numbers.

I have about 250 documents in Word and PowerPoint in Files in iCloud and I want to convert them fast and reliably to Pages and Keynote. Whenever I open one of those documents with Pages or Keynote it creates a duplicate.

What is the fastest and most reliable way on the iPad Pro to convert all those Word documents and Powerpoints?

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Why are you converting? Why not just keep them in that format and convert only when you want to edit? Save a lot of work.

I think the odds are safe that Word and PowerPoint will continue to exist for a while, as will Pages and Keynote.

And, allow to keep an archive duplicate in DOC or DOCX format, for security. I can’t fathom why that would be an issue.

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Agreed. I would do the same. Keep them in their native Word format and only open and convert as needed.

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I agree with @rms. If any of those documents have fancy formatting or Word-specific features, you might encounter big problems without realizing it until you open the file. Pages itself can open Word files fairly effectively, and so I would just convert as needed.

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Alright I will. Or I will just get a personal Office subscription. The problem is that I do have to access a lot of these PowerPoints at work, where Office is used as a presentation tool

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Keynote can read and write PowerPoint files.

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Why would you, keynote, pages and numbers can handle all types. So why would you keep an office subscription?

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Because I need to spouse it at work by accessing on my files from a windows machine I just realised. But they don’t offer me an office subscription

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The MS Office subscription is a really good deal. $10/month for 5 machine installs and 1TB storage each user! I get a lot of use out of mine even for the cloud storage.

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You can get MS Office Personal Edition for $50 for a year at Newegg right now.

They’ve also got the Home Edition for $79.99

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I had the same issue. Fortunately I could access the iCloud website from work which removed the need for office :slight_smile:

Have you looked at libreoffice?

https://www.libreoffice.org/

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Stick with MS Office! I too looked at switching but realised that the Office apps are actually really good, can be opened by virtually everyone and much easier when it comes to sharing and working on documents with others. Basically they are ubiquitous in the world of work.

Not sure how much spreadsheet work you do but Excel wipes the floor with Numbers. Formulas do not convert properly and it can take ages to sort out if you have complex sheets.

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I agree. Office is better than Apples version although iWork is more simple which I like. I will stick to Office because I don’t need to convert when sharing etc. But I am actually stickler for Apple products so when they do something then I use theirs because of the benefits in the Apple ecosystem. But here it would actually be a benefit not be in the Apple ecosystem due to sharing.

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Have you considered moving instead to LibreOffice? It can read and write the Word formats and is as powerful. I’ve had lots of issues receiving things from folks only in Pages or Numbers format so much that for the people I get things regularly from I always request a LibreOffice file and in a couple of cases went ahead and installed LibreOffice on their macs and trained them in it just to save me hassle.

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Really a shame that your work isn’t offering a subscription for you, but it does seem like you’ve come to the best solution.

I was able to wean myself off Office only because I rarely need to share editable documents with others, and usually just send exported PDFs to others.

If you do ever switch away, and are worried about archiving your files, you can always export the files you really don’t want to lose to PDFs. That said, the free web version does a pretty good job at opening office files nowadays. (I just don’t think you can edit.)

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Hej Andreas,
You could also consider Google G Suite, which I am using. It can work with Microsoft Office in its native format, so you don’t have to convert, just upload the files to your account and open and edit, and then save in Office format.
I am using G Suite, but I assume the Gmail version of Docs, Sheets and Presentation support it in the same way.
Hilsen Ole

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Thanks and welcome to the community.