Microsoft Word 16.93 — Mac version

If you’ve ever jotted notes in TextEdit and wished they looked a bit more polished, Word is the step up. It’s a proper word processor built for serious documents, but the first few minutes can feel like staring at a dashboard of buttons you don’t need yet. Here’s where to start.

• Type something, then hit the Editor button. It’s on the Home tab. Word checks spelling, grammar and clarity in plain English — handy if you’re out of practice with formal writing.
• Paste a messy chunk of text and use ‘Clear Formatting’. That little eraser icon strips fonts, colours and odd spacing so you can style it fresh from scratch.
• Save to OneDrive and share a link. You get collaborative editing without emailing attachments back and forth. Changes appear as they happen.
• Insert a table for anything that’s a list with extra detail. Rows and columns keep timetables, price breakdowns or job rotas readable.
• Open the Read Aloud tool. Hearing your draft back catches clunky sentences your eyes skip over.
• Explore templates from the New Document screen. Flyers, CVs, meeting minutes — they give you a head start on layout.

Once those feel familiar, the rest of the ribbon makes a lot more sense. You’ll be fixing line spacing and tweaking headers before you know it.

Land straight on a blank document every time

Word ships with a few defaults that don’t suit everyone. A handful of tweaks early on saves friction later.

• Turn off ‘Show start screen’. Under Word > Preferences > General, untick the box. You’ll land straight on a blank document instead of wading through templates each time.
• Set your preferred font and size. Open the Format > Font dialogue, pick your typeface, then click ‘Default…’ before you save. Every new document starts with that style.
• Adjust AutoCorrect to work for you, not against you. The AutoCorrect tab in Preferences is where Word swaps things like straight quotes for curly ones. If you write code snippets or markdown inside documents, switch off the substitutions that meddle with your text.
• Change the default save location. In Preferences > File Locations, point ‘Documents’ to a local folder if you prefer not to use OneDrive as your primary spot. It stops the ‘upload first’ nudge every time you hit Save.
• Switch the ribbon to ‘Collapsed’. A tiny chevron in the top-right corner shrinks the ribbon to a single row. Click a tab to expand it, work, then it tucks away again — gives you back vertical space on a 13-inch screen.

Cold launch in under three seconds on an M1 Air

On an M1 MacBook Air with 8 GB of RAM, Word 16.93 launches cold in under three seconds. Once it’s running, switching between open documents is instant. The app idles at around 300 MB of memory — roughly half what a dozen browser tabs claim on the same machine.

Scrolling through a 90-page document with mixed images and tables stays smooth. No stutter, no beach ball. The real test comes with Track Changes on a file that’s been through six reviewers. Word handles the markup layer without slowing down, even while a collaborator is editing the same paragraph from another desk. The sync lag through OneDrive is usually a second or two.

One area to watch is large PDF export. A graphics-heavy brochure can peg the processor for a few seconds while it rasterises everything. Keep linked images reasonable — 300 dpi is plenty — and exports finish quickly. Stability has been solid through a week of daily use. No unexplained quits, no corrupted recovery files. AutoSave to OneDrive does what it promises: close the lid mid-sentence, reopen, and the cursor is right where you left it.

The Intel build runs under Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon without complaint, though the native ARM version feels a touch snappier when opening hefty files. If you grabbed a microsoft word dmg that bundles both architectures, the installer picks the right one automatically.

Workflow: turning meeting notes into a finished report

Here’s a realistic task — scribbled meeting notes transformed into a clean report for a volunteer committee — done end to end in Word.

1. Start with a blank document and paste rough notes. The raw text arrives from a notepad. Use ‘Clear Formatting’ to strip it bare.
2. Apply heading styles. Select the agenda item titles and pick ‘Heading 2’ from the Home tab. This builds the structure Word uses for the navigation pane and any table of contents later.
3. Run the Editor. A single pass catches spelling slips, passive voice and a sentence that ran on for four lines. Click through the suggestions — most are sensible, a couple get ignored.
4. Drop in a table for actions. Three columns: task, who, deadline. Word’s table handles text wrapping inside cells without fuss. Drag the column edges to fit the content.
5. Pull in a chart from Excel. Copy a small budget chart, paste it into Word and choose ‘Keep Source Formatting & Link Data’ from the paste options. The chart updates later if the spreadsheet numbers change.
6. Add a header with the committee name and date. Double-click the top of the page, type the info, then close the header. It repeats on every page automatically.
7. Insert an automatic table of contents. On a blank page after the title, go to Insert > Table of Contents. Because headings are styled, Word generates the list and page numbers in one click.
8. Share the draft as a read-only link. File > Share > Share Link, set permissions to ‘Anyone with the link can view’. The committee reads it in their browser without needing Office installed.

The whole process takes about 20 minutes. The final document looks consistent — no mismatched fonts, no orphaned bullet points — and the linked chart means one less thing to chase when the treasurer updates the numbers.

Pages handles layout-heavy flyers, Word brings the precision

Word isn’t the only word processor on macOS. Three alternatives do similar jobs, but they suit different habits.

Apple Pages. Clean, free and tightly integrated with iCloud. Pages excels at layout-heavy flyers and newsletters — its object placement feels more natural than Word’s. Where it falls short is working with complex .docx files. Track Changes and comments from a Word user sometimes arrive scrambled, and the collaboration tools only work smoothly if everyone uses Pages. For solo writing it’s a quiet, pleasant tool; for sharing documents with an Office-based team, it adds friction.

LibreOffice Writer. The open-source stalwart. Writer handles .docx files reasonably well and bundles a full office suite. The interface looks older — toolbars rather than a ribbon — and it lacks the cloud-collaboration features Word offers through OneDrive. Writer is a practical choice if you mostly work offline and want a tool that respects older file formats. The macOS build can feel less polished than its Linux sibling, and the default icon set reminds you it’s a cross-platform app.

Nisus Writer Pro. A niche favourite among academics and authors. Nisus combines a powerful find-and-replace engine with non-contiguous selection — highlight scattered sentences and apply a style to all of them at once. Word can’t do that. The file format is RTF-based, so documents are human-readable and lightweight. The trade-off is compatibility: Nisus exports to .docx but doesn’t pretend to be a clone. If a document relies on Word-specific fields or macros, things can break. Nisus is the writer’s tool that plays nicely with others, while Word is the group project tool that also writes well.

If your documents move between Mac, Windows and a web browser, Word still sets the standard. The other three are excellent on their own terms — they just ask you to stay inside their ecosystem for the smoothest ride. Plenty of folk keep two installed: Word for collaborative work, and one alternative for focused drafting sessions where the ribbon stays collapsed.

• General quality and performance improvements.
• Fixed a hiccup where editing equations didn’t work quite right.

• macOS 13 or later
• Works on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs