Free Microsoft offices alternatives
If you are running your recently purchased PC on a Windows operating system chances are that is also including a trial version of Microsoft Office. Once this trial version expires, you could pay whatever the fee is to purchase a full license or, you could very well try using one of the many free alternatives to Microsoft Office that have nothing to envy compared to the paid versions of the latter. If instead, you are one of the many savvy people out there and have already made the switch to Linux or are planning to do it, then this article still applies to you.
In this article I will guide you to do just that by listing the top 3 competitors for MS Office that also come at zero price tag.
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The first of Free Microsoft offices alternatives that is well worth to mention is LibreOffice
LibreOffice is a completely free suite for individuals, companies and the Public Administration, which offers full compatibility with files produced through Microsoft Office. Based on the very well known OpenOffice, LibreOffice is a spoon off software initiative that basically came out from Some of the OpenOffice Master Heads that left after this was acquired by Oracle and they feared that the latter would terminate the Open Office Project. LibreOffice is nowadays one of the few free alternatives available that allows you to download and also use a practical portable version of the software. As a result, you will be able to store LibreOffice on any medium of your choice, for example, an external hard drive or on a common USB pen drive, without having to install it on your computer. LibreOffice is available in many languages, and is compatible with Windows, MacOS and Linux operating systems. Having said so, please be reminded that despite LibreOffice being fully compatible with all MS Office Programs it is true that from time to time the layout of a page or the font used in a Microsoft Word file might not be available on the free suite as being proprietary from a specific vendor. That is the “trade off” that you will have to pay when using this free software. However, in most of the cases there is a solution, for instance, in the case in question, if you are missing a font on your computer and you know that this font is part of the default Microsoft Windows fonts, you can install those onto your computer, (Ubuntu based distributions), by running a command from terminal such as this one below:
Hit ctrl/cmd + alt + T to launch your terminal then run this commandsudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
A new prompt will open and ask you to agree to the Microsoft EULA, (End Users License Agreement), which of course you will have to agree in order to carry on. Once you have done that, the font will be installed and your good to go.
If you had LibreOffice open at the time of installing the fonts you might need to save and close then reopen it in order to see the new fonts. This not always apply bu it is happened to me with other software like the Gimp.
The next Office Suite I am going to list here is of course Open Office
If you dig for OpenOffice on Wikipedia you will discover that this project has been alive for much more than what people might even know it. In fact, its first incarnation was with StarOffice 1.0 in 1985, then changed to OpenOffice around the year 2000, then changed again around the year 2012 when it became the “Apache OpenOffice”, which is what it is today. Despite its ups and down it had in all this years, OpenOffice is still among the best of the free alternatives to Microsoft Office. It is now owned by the Apache Software Foundation, from which LibreOffice inherits its fundamental components, there is also a more practical portable version for the OpenOffice suite which, among other things, includes the same applications as LibreOffice. Unfortunately, however, OpenOffice is not updated as often as LibreOffice, but on balance it still remains another valid free solution compared to Microsoft Office. OpenOffice is available for individuals, for companies and for the Public Administration, and is compatible with Windows, MacOS and Linux operating systems. A part for LibreOffice being updated more often than OpenOffice another one particular difference that I have noticed myself is that of OpenOffice not being able to save your document as .docx which is a real bummer if you have to share it with colleagues of friends and you know that are MS Windows users and might need to export your document as a PDF file. The rest of the differences between the two are minimal and mainly cosmetics.
My last choice is WPS Office from Kingsoft
WPS Office is proposed as one of the best free alternatives available, precisely because this application, according to the manufacturers, offers better compatibility with files produced through the classic Microsoft suite. However, the free version of WPS Office includes only Writer, which corresponds to Word, Spreadsheets, which corresponds to Excel, and Presentation, which corresponds to PowerPoint. In addition to being usable on Windows, WPS Office is also available free for Linux, Android and iOS. One of the things that you will notice as soon as you launch WPS Office is that its interface really looks similar, (if not almost the same), to the one of the MS Office counterpart, you can even have “the ribbon” in your top menu bar. WPS Office can save your documents as docx or your spreadsheets as xlsx and even export them as PDF. Another good feature for someone could be the available templates online for your documents. Again here, the free version contains basic templates but the paid version offers more. On the annoying side of the things is that the free versions of this software includes ads. Other than that, this time on the cool side of the properties of this software, when you open a MS Office document with the WPS Office software you rarely encounter problems and the layout of it is exactly as you would expect it to be.
This concludes today’s article, I have not mention other alternatives as well as online alternative otherwise this article would grow extensively and I do like to keep it short and effective. Perhaps in my next one I will talk of the possibility to use only web software, thus bypassing the issue of having to install a selected software for a specific operating system, until then, stay creative and enjoy your Linux OS whichever distro you are using.
Digital Designer, blog writer and also a tech enthusiast.
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