Free Alternatives – MS Office

Article submitted by Ralph Larsson

Do you need a word processer, or spreadsheet but don’t want to use, or pay for, MS Office?

Here are some good, and free alternatives that are all 100% compatible with MS Office.

Google offers a Web-based word processor and spreadsheet that is comparable with Word. It is accessed through your web browser, preferably through Google Chrome.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/

The link (above) will open, just like Word, asking the type of document you want to create, select ‘Blank’ (or whatever) and start typing.

It provides a full set of functions and facilities. Pretty much all of the stuff MS Word provides.

When you’re done, under ‘File’ (on the top menu bar) select ‘Download’ and pick the format you want it saved in (Word DOC is an option, as is PDF), and then tell it where, on your computer to save it.

Note that you are doing all of your work on a web page. Not on an application running on your computer.

Microsoft now also offers, (believe it or not), a free, Web-based version of Office. And it’s free! It offers, all of the most popular applications, like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just like Google, the application runs on the Internet, not on your computer, but it allows you to save your document on to your computer’s hard drive.

https://office.com

You’ll need to create an account with Microsoft, but that’s free and easy.

Note that because of the limitations of web-based software there are some aspects of both of these products (Google’s and Microsoft’s) that simply cannot be delivered as smoothly and seamlessly as a program that runs on your PC.

If you do want to do all of the work on software running on your PC, consider downloading Apache OpenOffice.

https://www.openoffice.org/

Apache is a trusted software vendor, well known by programmers for providing a lot of the software used to build and operate commercial web pages.

You can download their software from their web site (above), for free. OpenOffice is a direct competitor of MS Office, and includes Apache’s versions of Word (‘Writer’), Excel (‘Calc’), PowerPoint (‘Impress’), and more.

Here’s a link to the ‘Writer’ User’s Manual PDF, in case you want to check it out, before installing the software. https://wiki.openoffice.org/w/images/8/8a/0104GS33-GettingStartedWithWriter.pdf Writer, can also save a document as a Word DOC.

There are certainly other, free word processing options out there. These three, Google Docs, Microsoft Office Online, and Apache OpenOffice/Writer are very popular solutions.