Best Free Alternatives to Microsoft Office Suite
Almost all Windows users install Microsoft Office suite in their computer system. Microsoft Office is one of the essential software which are installed immediately after a fresh installation of Windows OS.
We use Microsoft Word to create documents, MS Excel to create spreadsheets, PowerPoint to create slides for meetings, etc. But the sad part is that Microsoft Office is not free and you need to spend lots of bucks to purchase it.
Many people download or purchase illegal pirated copies of Microsoft Office to use. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get an absolutely free Office suite which works similar to Microsoft Office and can be used as an alternative to Office suite?
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Today in this topic, we are going to share a few free Office suites which can be used as alternative to Microsoft Office:
Table of Contents
1. OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org is one of the most popular open-source office suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages.
2. Kingsoft Office Suite
Kingsoft Office Suite is a complete Office suite which provides a UI similar to Microsoft Office 2003. Its very light on resources and runs very fast. It comes with Kingsoft Writer (Microsoft Word), Kingsoft Spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel), Kingsoft Presentation (Microsoft PowerPoint) and Built-in PDF converter. Its highly compatible with almost all Microsoft Office file formats.
3. SoftMaker FreeOffice
SoftMaker FreeOffice is a full-featured office suite that comes with a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation-graphics program. SoftMaker FreeOffice comes with TextMaker (Word processor), PlanMaker (Spreadsheet) and SoftMaker Presentations (Presentation graphics). You can download a fully functional version of the SoftMaker FreeOffice using following link:
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4. IBM Lotus Symphony
IBM Lotus Symphony is a richly-featured set of productivity tools like Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations. Lotus Symphony is based on the open source OpenOffice.org code and supports the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, which means you’re not locked into proprietary file formats, software licensing agreements and upgrades.
Download Link (No longer available…)
5. LibreOffice
LibreOffice is the power-packed free and open source Office suite for Windows, Macintosh and GNU/Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base.
6. KOffice
KOffice is another free Office suite which comes with KWord which is an intuitive word processor application with desktop publishing features, KCells which is a fully-featured spreadsheet application, Showcase which is a powerful and easy to use presentation application, Kivio for diagramming and flowcharting and Artwork for drawing vector graphics.
Download Link (No longer available…)
Please let us know your opinion about these free alternatives to Microsoft Office suite. Which one do you like the most and why? Feel free to share other free alternatives if you know…
Are there any other suites which provide the office ribbon like thing
There is an app called notepad 2008 that has a basic ribbon interface but it only opens text files but can’t found anymore online unless you search hard enough for it like I did.I could email it to VG and maybe he could get permission from the dev to host it here?
^^ I think once I blogged about it but later I removed it because the software was using code of another software without permission. So the developer removed the program so did I.
Following is a better alternative:
https://www.askvg.com/fluentnotepad-simple-notepad-for-windows-with-office-2010-ribbons-ui/
Has anyone ever tried SSuite Office?
They have a few free versions available for download on their web site.
Anyone?
SCBright: Both you and the author of this article confuse SoftMaker Office 2008 (which is no longer available for free) with SoftMaker FreeOffice (which this article links to). SoftMaker FreeOffice is an offshoot of the current version of SoftMaker Office and definitely does open DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. It even does a great job at this.
^^ Thanks for the update. Actually at the time of writing this article, it was known as SoftMaker Office 2008 and was available for free. Now I have corrected it. 🙂
I have tried kingsoft free, softmaker freeoffice and openoffice of these I definitely prefer softmaker it is truly an amazing program plus it seems to have the best compatibility with the docx format. i’ve opened docx files in kingsoft and it would completely change the formatting the same with openoffice it wouldn’t even open docx files properly.
After having read this report and the comments, I was curious and downloaded SoftMaker Freeoffice. It has the best interoperability with Microsoft Office formats of all free alternatives I ever used, and it works fast and reliable so far. My vote goes out for this excellent piece of software! Much better than LibreOffice & Co.
Thanks for providing this resource. Although some minor changes to document formatting may be required for some files this program does a good job of letting you impart the same functionality available in the MS Office suite. Another great feature is it lets you save in MS Office formats so other users can readily open the files. Am still finding out about functions and features so will reserve coment on those in a future post: so far all looks great! Thanks again :-0)
Is the maker of SoftMaker FreeOffice Chinese? It’s the only reason why we can’t use WPS Office.
Although these are all pretty fine, you’re missing the Nevron Text Editor, which is a whole different level of text editing. Not only does it allow people to write text just as MS Word, but it allows them to also export this text into an HTML with inline styles, so it can be pasted anywhre!
docs.nevron.com
I’ve tried the above mentioned SSuite Office. They have a whole range of free office suite to choose from.
I went for their laptop version, and I’m very impressed. It even included a network video phone for instant communications. {ssuitesoft.com/officesuites.htm}
A really worthy alternative to any other office suite that was mention. Really surprised that they weren’t included in the original list.
Kingsoft which is now WPS, can’t be classed as “Free” now, because the latest version leaves a watermark when printed, so it is more or less useless. I have reverted to an old version 9.1.0.4550, & disabled automatic updates for this program, because if you update ,you’re back to square one