If you don’t have the apps installed already, you can download them through the Mac App Store if you have an Apple ID. To run them, open launchpad and type the name of the app, or look for the Pages, Notepad, or Keynote icons. Most Macs ship with the apps installed by default.

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are all free apps for any Mac owner. It’s basically a juiced-up Microsoft PowerPoint with a sense of Apple aesthetics. It handles graphically-rich presentations with great transitions, embedded video in slides, high-quality charts, and even supports multiple people giving the same presentation. Apple first launched it in January 2003 on the Mac, and it’s remained an essential Mac app ever since. Keynote originated as an app developed for Steve Jobs to help him with his trademark live keynote presentations. Keynote: The Secret to Nice Presentations Apple And like the other iWork apps, Numbers includes very handy templates that cover a wide variety of situations, such as planning a family budget, calculating savings, creating invoices, and even keeping track of school attendance. It’s a spreadsheet app sporting a deep feature set (charts, sorting, formulas, inserting media) that can also work with Microsoft Excel workbooks. Numbers is the relative newcomer to the iWork suite, but not by much: Apple added Numbers to iWork in 2007 with the iWork ’08. It also includes nice templates for various types of documents like resumes, letters, books, and reports-and it edits Microsoft Word documents with ease. It includes all the features you’d expect in a word processor since 1984 (fonts, bold, italics, justification) plus support for tables, charts, and inserting rich media into documents.

Perhaps the crown jewel of the iWork suite, Pages is a solid word processor that also doubles as a page layout app similar to Adobe InDesign. RELATED: How to Create an Apple ID on Your iPhone or iPad Pages: A Versatile Word Processor Apple Let’s take a brief look at each app individually below. You can also edit the same documents on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and in the cloud. Each of these iWork apps can handle importing or exporting files from their Microsoft equivalent apps, which makes collaborating with Windows owners a little easier.

Microsoft office suite for macbook pro