this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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Disabled or pirated are not the only options:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/
Since the OP specifies Mac users, as a Mac user, I find iWork perfectly serviceable. I think it's a bit controversial with its "Ribbon" on the right rather than the top, though it kind of makes sense. I don't love iWork (Writer, Numbers, and Keynote), but they are good and they come with Macs (or at the very least are free in the App Store).
I have tried LibreOffice recently, and I didn't care for it. But I am glad that such a robust free office suite is available on Windows. I believe some Linux distros ship with it, too. If I didn't have iWork, I'd probably just use LibreOffice. It's not terrible, I just have a better choice.
The few times I tried using LibreOffice, it's anything but robust. Very bad UX, and even worse, it frequently crashes and fails to recover, resulting in data loss. And I've only been using Linux for more than 10 years now.
The Apple office apps are still free, but they do have an add-on subscription too now.
Yes... I was able to disable the subscription-oriented tools from Numbers (Excel) but not Pages (Word). Maybe I didn't try hard enough. They're marked so you can just not click on them, but there's a way to hide them. I did it on one, I can probably do it on the others.
They're completely free with a subscription for GenAI stuff that wasn't there before. They didn't take anything away from the free product.
Itβs been quite a while since I used iWork, but iWork is different than office. In some ways itβs a better product - the layout and formatting in Pages is worlds ahead of Word. Itβs not a clone of the Office suite, which works to its advantage.
Is iWork compatible with Office files though? That's going to be the sticking point for people who had been using it and lost access...
As far as I can tell, yes β and so is LibreOffice, since people are talking about that one, too. And I suspect they both have the same limitation β encrypted Office files. So yes, I can read .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files. I can't read Publisher (.pubx) files, but neither can Mac Office users β Microsoft never released Publisher for Mac. I can then write them to the iWork formats. I can also take an iWork document and export to Office. I suspect Office can import iWork files. Office interoperability is mostly a solved problem, though I think there are a few outlier cases.
Yes, it opens the files and can work with them. However to save them back to the original filetype, you need to export
^ This. Easy to get, easy to install, works like a charm and the license is "perpetual" you won't need bother with it ever again.
The last Mac I put this on was determined not to let me change doc files to open with it no matter what I did. It would change it for individual files only, but not the file type. Maybe because it was m1 or something.