New to Mac? - Tip 2 (from Liz’s personal experience)

Filed under Software

Creating Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents on your mac without needing to install Microsoft Office.

Many iPhone and iPod customers have given their main reason for not buying a Mac is because they didn’t think they could create, send and read Microsoft files such as Word or Excel on their mac.

Mac can create Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations through iWork!

Here’s how to do it:

Word Documents

Open Pages

Create your pages document and select the file menu > Save

A dialogue box appears on your screen with a small blue arrow on the left hand side.

Click on this small blue arrow and this screen opens

There is a small check box at the bottom titled “Save copy as” which is unchecked.

Check this box and you are given the options to save your pages document as a “Word Document” or as “iWork 08”.

Choose “Word Document”  and click on the save button at the bottom.  Now you have a word document (.doc) saved in your choosen destination (in my case on the desktop but you may have choosen your own file to save it in)

Note:
Pages can always open word documents so don’t worry too much about saving a pages and a word version on your machine.  I choose to stick to word when creating documents I regularly send out to people.

Excel Document

Follow exactly the same steps as with pages but in your Numbers program. 

This time you will get the option to save as an excel document or an iWork 08 document.

as with Pages, Numbers can open excel documents with ease, so again, you can always just save as excel if that is your preferred choice.

Powerpoint Presentations

These steps are the same as pages and numbers but this time i shall give you a few extra hints and tips to make sure your presentation looks the same at the other end when you send it via email:

If you are using special fonts or fonts that aren’t shared with a PC (only a handful are shared between a mac and a PC) make sure you send them in the email along with your presentations, word documents etc.  This is good practice when you send documents regardless of whether you are on a PC or Mac if the font styles are important to you.  It’s very simple to do and I talk about how to do this in he next Knowledge base article “Tip 3”.

If you create something nice and fancy that Powerpoint can’t do, Keynote will tell you when you try to save it as a Powerpoint document.  The best rule to stick to when creating something that will be used as a Powerpoint presentation is Keep it simple!

 

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Published on June 03, 2010 | Author: Liz Imrie | Last updated on June 03, 2010