Word, Excel and PowerPoint on the Mac: what survives the trip to Pages, Numbers and Keynote?

This whitepaper is part of the series Mac and the rest of the world, about how your Mac gets along with a world that mostly runs on Windows and Microsoft. This time: documents. Every Mac comes with Pages, Numbers and Keynote, free. But your colleagues, your accountant and the local council send you .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files. What works when you move those files back and forth, what breaks, and when are you better off just using Word?

Where things stand in 2026

Pages, Numbers and Keynote are still free. One thing did change in January 2026: Apple launched Apple Creator Studio, a subscription (in the US, 12.99 dollars a month or 129 dollars a year) with Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro and a few other pro apps. The three office apps are part of it too, but only for extras: premium templates, a library of photos and illustrations, and AI features like generating formulas and Magic Fill in Numbers, or drafting a presentation in Keynote. Apple has more or less stopped using the name iWork.

What matters for this story: exchanging files with Office does not depend on that subscription. Opening and exporting to Word, Excel and PowerPoint works fine in the free version, apart from the occasional upgrade prompt.

The file formats

• .pages, .numbers, .key: Apple’s own formats. A Windows user cannot open them in Office. There is no Pages for Windows.
• .docx, .xlsx, .pptx: Microsoft’s standard. Pages, Numbers and Keynote open them and can export to them.
• PDF: the only format that looks the same everywhere. Not meant for further editing.

Opening an Office file in Pages is simple: double-click it, or drag it onto the Pages icon. Pages then makes a copy in its own format. To send it back, choose File > Export To > Word in Pages. Numbers and Keynote work the same way, with Excel and PowerPoint. Keep in mind the file goes through two translations, once on the way in and once on the way out. Something can get lost each time.

Word and Pages

According to Apple’s own compatibility list, plain text, styles, footnotes, tables, headers and footers, page numbers and images come across fine.

What goes wrong

• Track changes: Pages keeps tracking changes to body text, but all other changes (formatting, for example) are simply accepted when the file is opened. That is exactly what you don’t want with a contract a lawyer has been working on.
• Comments: text comments come along. Threaded replies and the “resolved” status from newer Word versions are a gamble; I couldn’t confirm how they’re handled.
• Table of contents: still works, but not all styling is kept.
• Tables in headers or footers are not supported. Plenty of corporate templates rely on exactly that.
• Watermarks, page borders, macros and Word themes disappear.
• Citations from Word’s own citation manager stay as text but can no longer be managed. EndNote does work.
• Links to other files are removed.

Fonts: Calibri and Aptos

This is where things often go wrong without you noticing. Since 2023 Aptos has been the default font in Microsoft 365; before that it was Calibri. Both are Microsoft fonts, not Apple fonts. As far as I know neither ships with macOS. If you have Office for Mac installed, Calibri comes along and Aptos is fetched from the cloud, but those cloud fonts are meant for the Office apps themselves. Pages doesn’t automatically see them.

The result: Pages swaps in something similar. Different letter widths mean different line breaks, so twelve pages become thirteen and your table runs over. Pages warns about missing fonts when you open the file. Take that warning seriously.

What you can do:

• Microsoft offers Aptos as a separate download for apps that can’t reach the Office font service, Mac included. Install it with Font Book.
• If you work on Office documents that need to go back, use the same font as the other person in Pages, or a font that exists on both systems, like Arial or Georgia.

Excel and Numbers

Numbers is great for a budget or a list, but it isn’t Excel. Apple is honest about that in its own compatibility list.

What works

• Regular formulas, conditional formatting, filters, merged cells and most chart types.
• XLOOKUP, VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH are supported. You’ll sometimes read otherwise online, but Apple’s own list says they are.
• Pivot tables: most settings are kept. Slicers and timelines are removed.
• Comments come along.

What doesn’t

• Macros and VBA are not supported. A model that runs on macros is simply dead in Numbers.
• Power Query and external data: not supported. The connections are gone and you’re left with the last loaded values.
• Data validation (dropdowns in cells), protected sheets and locked cells: not supported.
• Tracked changes: not supported.
• Quite a few functions are missing, including the database functions (DSUM and friends), GETPIVOTDATA, AGGREGATE, TEXT and many of the newer statistical functions with a dot in the name, like STDEV.S and NORM.DIST.
• Sparklines and surface charts disappear.

My advice: feel free to look at a serious Excel file in Numbers, but edit it in Excel.

PowerPoint and Keynote

Keynote handles PowerPoint surprisingly well. Most transitions and animations carry over, as do presenter notes, hidden slides, narration and comments.

What to watch for:

• Video and audio only play if Apple supports the format. An old .wmv from a Windows presentation won’t play. Convert videos to .mp4 (H.264) instead.
• Slide masters don’t all come across. Corporate templates can look slightly off as a result.
• SmartArt becomes a plain shape. You still see it, but you can’t edit it as SmartArt any more.
• Text overflowing its box, WordArt and text effects aren’t supported.
• Going the other way, from Keynote to PowerPoint, you mostly lose the nice Keynote transitions PowerPoint doesn’t have, such as Magic Move. They get replaced or dropped.

The alternatives

Microsoft Office for Mac

If you work with Office documents a lot, this is simply the sensible choice. Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Mac read and write the same files as on Windows. VBA works on the Mac too, although macros that call Windows-specific components won’t. Power Query exists in Excel for Mac, but with fewer data sources than on Windows. For setting up Microsoft 365 on your Mac, see Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365 on the Mac.

Office in the browser

With a free Microsoft account you can use Word, Excel and PowerPoint in your browser. Less complete than the apps, but plenty for reviewing a document with tracked changes or making a quick edit. And it’s real Office, so the formatting stays intact.

LibreOffice

Free and open source, on Mac, Windows and Linux. It handles .docx and .xlsx reasonably well, though layouts can shift here too. It can also import Apple’s formats; I haven’t tested how well that works right now.

Google Docs as neutral ground

When you work with people who all use something different, Google Docs, Sheets or Slides is often the easiest place to write together. Everyone works in the browser and nobody has to convert anything. Google opens .docx, .xlsx and .pptx and exports back to them. It doesn’t open Apple’s formats.

PDF as the final stop

Is the document done and nobody needs to touch it again? Send a PDF. In Pages: File > Export To > PDF. Then you know the recipient sees what you see, fonts included.

What to use when

Step-by-step plan

1. When an Office file comes in, first check what’s in it: tracked changes, macros, pivot tables with slicers, video. If it has any of those, open it in Office, not in Pages, Numbers or Keynote.
2. When opening in Pages, watch for the missing fonts warning. Install Aptos from Microsoft’s download if you often work with Microsoft 365 documents.
3. Edit in the app that belongs to the format whenever you can. Every conversion costs something.
4. Export via File > Export To to the Office format and open the exported file yourself once more, preferably in Office in the browser. That way you see what the recipient sees.
5. When it’s finished, send a PDF.
6. If you work with a Microsoft environment on a regular basis, get Microsoft 365 and work in that company’s shared files.
7. Sent a .pages file by accident? The recipient can view it on iCloud.com with a (free) Apple Account. It’s tidier to follow up with a .docx or PDF.

And with Apple?

Pages, Numbers and Keynote are good apps: free, good looking, and for your own documents often nicer than Office. Collaborating between Apple devices is smooth, and through iCloud.com even a Windows user can join in. But Apple never tried to rebuild Office, and you notice that the moment a file has to go back to someone who lives in Word or Excel. Creator Studio doesn’t change that.

My conclusion: use Apple’s apps for what’s yours, and Office for what belongs to someone else.

This whitepaper describes the situation in October 2026, with macOS Golden Gate (macOS 27) and the current versions of Pages, Numbers, Keynote and Microsoft 365. Apple and Microsoft update their apps regularly, so always test important files yourself before sending them.

This article is part of the Mac and the rest of the world series, where you’ll find every part in one place.