MacinSpot

When purchasing and Mac, think about getting free from all Microsoft products, including Office. Try the iWorks suite, which is cheaper than Office. You may get a bunch of extra features with Excel for creating macros and performing complex math formulas, but if you just use Excel for basic stuff, like creating budget sheets, keeping up with expense reports and so on, you will be fine with Numbers. Other than that, you should have all you need and at a cheaper price.

For this article I will show you how to create a Pages document and save it in a Microsoft Word format. The same export feature that I will show you is the same for Keynote and Numbers as well. Once you know how to export to Microsoft Office format on one program, just apply the same basics to the other applications.

So to start, open up pages and create a blank document.

Once open, type what you want and save it the usual way in the standard Pages format. When you have finally finished or you are ready to send the document to a fellow Windows user(or another Mac user stuck on Microsoft Office) for editing, go to the File menu and select export.

A dialogue box will pop up with a few options across the top. You can even save your document in a PDF form. For purposes of this article, we will choose the Word option.

Click next at the bottom right and decide what you want to name this document as well as where you would like to save it to.

I chose the desktop to make things easy, but I always suggest saving your documents in the documents folder located in your home folder. Click export and the file will be exported to the proper Microsoft Word format.

Remember, this same technique applies to Numbers as well as Keynote. So you can save in Powerpoint or Excel formats. All three applications also let you save to PDF format for your Adobe crazy friends and coworkers. This article was written using iWorks ‘08. I am sure the feature is similar in ‘09, but I am not sure about previous versions.