Free Alternatives for Microsoft 365 (Microsoft Office)
One of the questions we are most frequently asked is: “What is the best free Microsoft 365 (Microsoft Office) alternative?” It’s not an easy question to answer – there are quite a few free alternatives to choose from.
We’ve picked our three favorite free alternatives to Microsoft 365 ( Microsoft Office). But you should remember that there are several online office suites, such as Google Workspace or MS 365 online, we could have mentioned, but most of you have asked for an MS 365 (Microsoft Office) alternative you can download and use on your computer and not in the cloud.
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is our top choice of free programs that can do just about everything MS 365 (MS Office) can do. This suite has alternatives for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access.
The LibreOffice suite has six programs: Writer (Word), Impress (PowerPoint), Calc (Excel), Base (Access), Math, and Draw. The biggest drawback to LibreOffice is that you can’t pick and choose which of these you want to install – you have to install the entire suite.
All of the programs in the LibreOffice suite can open, edit, and save to all the newer MS 365 (Microsoft Office) file formats.
You can read more about and/or download LibreOffice from here.
OpenOffice
OpenOffice has a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program, a graphics program, and a database program as part of its suite.
The programs and their corresponding MS 365 programs are listed below:
Writer (MS Word)
Calc (MS Excel)
Base (MS Access)
Impress (MS PowerPoint)
The main drawback to OpenOffice is that although you can save files in MS 365 formats, it does not, by default, save to these formats.
Most MS 365 formats can be opened, edited, and saved with OpenOffice, including DOC, DOCX, XML, XLS, XLW, DBF, PPT, PPS, and POTX.
OpenOffice allows you to select which programs in the OpenOffice you want to install which gives you the option of which programs in the OpenOffice suite you want to install, so you don’t end up installing programs you won’t use.
You can read more about and/or download OpenOffice from the Apache OpenOffice website.
WPS OFFICE FREE
WPS Office Free is a trimmed-down version of the WPS Office premium office suite, but it’s doubtful you’ll notice. WPS Office Free has three programs that look and work much like the latest versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – and they have equivalent features.
WPS Office Free supports MS Office file formats so you can save your work in native Microsoft Office formats for easy sharing with Office users. WPS Office Free also comes with an excellent free PDF reader. Please note, however, that if you need to use its advanced PDF editing features, you’ll need to purchase a subscription.
On the downside, the program tries to prompt you into upgrading to the paid versions of WPS Office, so there’s an occasional ad, but these are few and far between and won’t get in the way of your work. A small price to pay, we think, for everything you get in this suite is completely free.