Microsoft Office Suite is clearly the king of all the office applications that one would ever need. In the latest version of Microsoft Office comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Sway, Mail, People, Calendar, OneDrive, Docs and more. It works on all the popular platforms – Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows PC, and Mac, not to mention it is also available as a web app. It is available as one time purchase software in form of Office 2016 and also as a subscription service in form of Office 365. But if you do not want to shell out a lot of moolah for using Office products at your home or small office, then there are some real good FREE alternatives available.
I have personally tested and tried so many Office alternatives over past several years and have come to conclusion that there are only three suitable candidates worthy of being called as Microsoft Office alternatives (and all of them are free):
- WPS Office – Known previously as the Kingsoft Office, this office suite proves that some good things come in small sizes. With an installation file size of only 66 MB, it provides you with three most desired applications – WPS Writer, WPS Spreadsheets and WPS Presentation which are similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It packs many features, has low memory footprint, is very easy to use, runs beautifully on older computers and is of course, completely free of charge.
- Apache OpenOffice – This was the first office suite to truly challenge Microsoft Office. It is developed by the open source community and comes with six different programs to create or edit text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, drawings or formulas.
- LibreOffice – Originally called just a fork of the OpenOffice project, but now it has established its own identity. It basically has the similar components as OpenOffice, but it gets updated faster and offers a newer, modern interface.
All these three office suites are fully compatible with Microsoft Office products. Any files created by Microsoft Office suite can be easily opened and edited using any of these office suites. And the opposite is true too – you can open and edit files created by these office alternatives in Microsoft Office.