The Apple iWork suite of office apps after the redesign 5 years ago or so has been a piece of useless crap that should have been discontinued by now. That’s why it’s free. No one would pay for those apps if Apple continued to charge for them as they did in the past before they redesigned those apps.
What Apple should have done is base its redesigned suite of Office apps on LibreOffice / OpenOffice and add support for the iWorks file types for backward compatibility with iWorks.
Even though LibreOffice works in MacOS, its UI is terrible on the Mac. However, there is a Mac friendly port of LibreOffice called NeoOffice (it’s not free, but it’s cheap) supported by two part-time developers. It blows the Apple iWorks suite out of the water, even though it has its quirks, especially in Dark Mode.
Apple should pay the two guys $50 million, buy NeoOffice from them, and bring it to the polish that it deserves. If Apple did that, the Mac would finally get a decent and real alternative to MS Office.
When Apple went to the 64-bit only apps (in Catalina?) my old MS Office 2011 no longer worked. So, I searched for alternatives and found LibreOffce and NeoOffice. I’ve been using NeoOffice for 3 years now. The learning curve to use as a seasoned pro any part of it - alternatives to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint - is just a matter of a few minutes, as long as you know MS Office (especially MS Office for Windows 2010 and for Mac 2011 or earlier). Most menus and options are very similar to the old layout of MS office before Microsoft made MS Office almost unusable with all the crazy UI.
The design ideas behind LibreOffice/NeoOffice are definitely based on the old Microsoft Office design dating back to MS Office 5 for DOS and MS Office 6 for Windows, which were very well thought-through Office applications. Microsoft veered away from that design in their MS Office 2013 and later, shifting menus to the most absurd places and creating the fat bar with options on top of the page (which can’t be turned off and which constantly changes its content, making the whole experience maddening). The MS Office 2010 for Windows and 2011 for Mac were the last versions that were still based on the original MS Office 5 and 6 design, and that’s what NeoOffice resembles very closely.
The fact that Apple still drags along iWorks is an embarrassment. That suite has been dead for years and with LibreOffice available for forking by anyone, including Apple, and NeoOffice available for sale (I’m sure $50 million would finalize that sale in about a week), Apple should FINALLY get serious about its Office suite after 20 years of floundering and falling farther and farther behind.
However, with the current Apple leadership, I’m not holding my breath. They really have no clue what businesses need. They must be smoking some very potent weed if they believe that the iWorks suite is business-worthy. The most the iWorks apps are useful for is typing up home-cooking recipes and doing some basic home budgeting. And thats about it.