When it comes to getting Microsoft Word or any other Office application on a Mac, you have two options. You can either pay or you can use it for free.
Microsoft Word on Mac is available as an annual subscription, as part of Microsoft 365, as a one-off purchase, or there is an online version. While the subscription and one-off versions are both paid, the online version is free.
READY TO START YOUR OWN YOUTUBE CHANNEL?
How Much Is Microsoft Word for Mac?
You can buy Mircosoft Word individually for $80 or as part of the whole Office suite, also a one-off purchase, for $140. Alternatively, you can subscribe to Microsoft 365 as an individual for $70 per year or the better deal is $100 for a family of 6 people.
As part of the subscription, you’ll get Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Onenote, and 1 terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage per person.
Can You Download Microsoft Word For Free?
You can download Microsoft Word from the Mac App Store for free, but upon clicking open you’ll be prompted to pay. If you skip the payment option, you can still use Word in read-only mode. Meaning you can open documents but not edit them.
Do You Have To Pay For Microsoft Word?
Anyone can use Microsoft Word online for free by logging into office.com with a Microsoft account. Alternatively, students and teachers and subscribe to Microsoft 365 for free.
More information for students and teachers is available here.
For everyone else, if you’re old enough to remember life before Google and Gmail, then you might already have a Hotmail account, or if you’re slightly younger you may have a live.com or Outlook.com email address. All of these will work with the free online version of Microsoft office but if you don’t have an account, you can simply sign up for free.
Open up safari and navigate to Office.com. Provide your Microsoft account details or click on create an account. Once logged in, skip the prompt to go premium, and you’ll land on the home page, which is where you can access all of the Office applications for free.
To create a Word document click on the Word icon in the left-hand menu and select New Document, which will launch the application in your browser. If you’re familiar with using Word you’ll be familiar with this browser interface.
Since this is the free online version of Office, you don’t get the option to save files offline on your Mac. Instead, all your documents are saved to Microsoft’s cloud storage called OneDrive. You can give your document a filename and to view all your documents in your OneDrive account, simply click on the application icon in the left menu.
The beauty of using this online version of Office is that it is accessible from any computer on any platform - Mac, Windows, and mobile devices. The following video has more information on how to do all of that.
So there you have it - how to get Microsoft Word on Mac. To secure your Microsoft Account I recommend using Microsoft’s two-factor authentication app called Microsoft Authenticator. To learn how to set up Microsoft Authenticator, I created this video.
