Anyone who uses a computer needs some sort of office application at some point, either to create documents, presentations or spreadsheets. Office application are essential part of everyday computing, and helps end-users create documents, presentations, spreadsheets and other types of productivity-documents by editing these documents in a visual editor, usually with an easy-to-use interface that allows users to create what they need to create quickly and easily.
Among the many different office suites available today, the most popular, and most used office suite is Microsoft Office, a suite of applications created by Microsoft that includes a word processing, spreadsheet editor and presentation creator, as well as other applications like an email and calendar solution and a publishing solution. These are all very useful to end-users for a variety of tasks, but Microsoft Office can be quite pricey and unaffordable to some people – that’s why we’re going to take a look at alternative applications that can be used without having to pay any fees.
Whether you simply need to compose a document with research you’ve prepared for a project, or you need a complete suite of office and productivity applications to help you prepare professional documents for your business, there’s a variety of free applications that can help you perform the tasks you can perform with Microsoft Office. Some of the free applications we’ll be taking a look at will offer a bundled solution that includes different applications, each with their own functionality, and others will offer a single purpose like word processing or creating a presentation – after comparing these free applications, you’ll be able to determine which combination would work best for you, and help you increase your productivity without having additional costs.
Microsoft Office
Before starting a comparison and having a look at alternative software to the Microsoft Office suite of applications, we should first have a look at the features offered by the Microsoft Office Suite in order to determine what our requirements are.
The latest version of Microsoft Office is their new cloud-based Office 365 suite, which allows you to subscribe to a service and pay a monthly fee to use their suite of applications. You’ll be able to choose between different versions of the Office 365 suite, each with it’s own features and bundled applications – this helps you minimize your costs by only subscribing to the applications you really need.
Office 365 – Home & Personal, Small Business or Student
When subscribing to Microsoft Office 365, you c an choose between the Home & Personal, Small Business or Student version, and each version comes in different editions with their own pricing models. You’ll also be able to choose between paying a fee on a monthly basis, or rather once every year.
Office 365 Home & Personal Edition
The Home & Personal Edition of Office 365 is perfect for individuals who needs to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations from home. This edition comes in 4 different flavors, including Office 365 Home, Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home and Student 2013 and Office Mac Home Student 2011. Depending on the flavor you select, you’ll receive access to a variety of the Office applications, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and more.
Office 365 Small Business Edition
This edition of Office 365 have been customized for small businesses and includes office applications that’s suitable for business functions like creating professional documents and presentations, putting together research reports, storing data in a database and creating professional publications.
Office 365 Student
This isn’t really an edition of Office 365, but rather an offer. If you are a student, currently studying, you’ll be able to receive a discount on Office 365 in order to use the suite of applications for educational purposes like taking notes, creating reports and more.
Office 365 Applications
The applications we need to find free alternatives for are all unique, each offering it’s own features and purpose. Let’s determine which applications we need to find alternatives for in order to move on to having a look at the available alternatives.
Word
Word is one of the core applications of Microsoft Office. This is a powerful document application that offers advance word processing features, as well as document layout and typography features to help end-users create high quality documents for print and the web. Word is also used by alot of authors to write their books in, and then exported to a format that can be sent to the printers or published as an eBook.
Excel
Excel is a spreadsheet application that offers advance features for creating powerful and flexible spreadsheets. With Excel, you can also create graphs, formulas, tables and much more to make reports look and feel more professional, and make them easier to read and understand.
PowerPoint
PowerPoint lets you create presentations by putting together a collection of slides. Each slide can be customized in any way you want, and can even contain videos and audio. Once you have completed a presentation in PowerPoint, you can export your presentation in different formats to use and display on various devices and applications.
Outlook
Outlook is the Microsoft Office Suite’s email, calender and contacts application. This application provides a professional interface that allows you to add your email accounts to receive and send emails, and gives you a full calender and contacts manager for managing your schedule and keeping all your contacts in one place.
These are the most popular applications included in the Microsoft Office Suite, and we’ll be taking a look at alternative software you can use without having to pay any fees.
Free Alternatives
Now that we’ve determined the types of applications we are looking for, we can start by looking at a variety of free and open source solutions that can help you perform these tasks for free.
Office Suite – Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations
To start out, let’s have a look at different office suites that’s available for free. These suites include at least a word processor, spreadsheet editor and a slideshow / presentation creator.
Kingston / WPS Office 2013
WPS Office 2013 is probably the closest alternative you’ll be able to find to Microsoft Office, that’s free to install and use. This suite can be downloaded and installed for free on a variety of operating systems and devices, and includes all the office and productivity tools you need to create professional documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
With the recent release of their Mobile applications, WPS Office now offers even more features for home and business users to maximize their productivity through their free software solutions.
Features
WPS Office has a lot to offer end-users, whether you’re a student, business owner or simply an individual in need of compiling some documents; WPS Office features a variety of functions to help make you more productive, and speed up the process of creating documents.
Familiar look
All of the applications bundled in WPS Office features a sleek, modern and familiar look that anyone that will make anyone that’s used to using Microsoft Office products feel right at home.
Compatibility
WPS Office is fully compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint, Word and Excel files, and supports DOC, XLS, PPT, TXT, PDF and many more formats.
Templates
WPS Office also gives you access to hundreds of downloadable templates that can be accessed directly from the landing page of their applications. These templates can be downloaded and used for free.
WPS Cloud and File Roaming
Access your documents and files on all your devices with WPS Cloud and File Roaming. This gives you storage space in the cloud to save your documents in, thus giving you access to your documents on any device running WPS Office. Your documents will be saved to WPS Office’s Secure Cloud, and will be protected and save from hackers.
Document Sharing
WPS Office makes it easy to share your documents with colleagues and friends with the built in email function.
WPS Office on any device
WPS Office has over 700 million users worldwide and is one of the most popular office suites for PC and Mobile users. They offer a free version of their software on all platforms, as well as paid versions that offer additional features and upgrades to existing features.
WPS Office can be installed on Microsoft Windows, Linux Distributions, iOS Devices and also on Android devices; giving you the ability to have WPS Office running on all your devices, and the opportunity to have all your files with you, all the time, on all of your devices.
Included Applications
WPS Office includes 3 applications in it’s suite, each offering unique features to make you more productive, and help you compose important documents more quickly.
Writer
Writer is a word processor that’s included with WPS Office. With writer, you get a fully featured rich text editor to create and edit documents of any size. You can also use advance features such as margins, spell check, charts, watermarks, borders, headers and footers, different page layouts and more.
Apart from offering these features, Writer is also 100% compatible with Microsoft Word documents, and can save documents in a wide variety including PDF and Open Document Format.
- Compatible with a wide range of different document formats
- Exports to different formats including PDF
- Rich text editor with paragraph and shape formatting features
- Paragraph tool lets you make quick changes to margins and spacing
- Includes advanced collaboration features like track changes, spell check and comments
- Advance and powerful layout tools and options
Presentation
Presentation is an alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint and offers a range of powerful features and modern templates that lets you easily create professional presentations and slideshows to present your work, proposals or create a multimedia presentation for your product.
The powerful features of WPS Presentation can be used to create and edit a variety of Presentation formats, including Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. Once completed, the presentation can be exported to different formats to be used on different media and devices.
- Compatible with a wide range of presentation and slideshow formats
- Modern, easy-to-use interface that’s user-friendly and fast to learn
- Advance features for working with text, paragraphs and shapes
- Ability to add photos, videos, sound and more to your presentations
- Ability to work with graphs, charts and tables in your presentations
- Free templates included to help you kickstart presentations
- Notes can be viewed in the “Presenter mode”
Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets is the third application included in the WPS Office Suite, and is an excellent free alternative to Microsoft Excel. With WPS Spreadsheets, you can use over 160 formulas and functions, and you can create multiple worksheets in a single spreadsheet document.
You can also open and edit Microsoft Excel files with WPS Spreadsheets, as well as a variety of other formats. WPS Spreadsheets can also export spreadsheets to different formats, including Microsoft Excel’s spreadsheet format.
- Compatible with a wide range of spreadsheet formats
- Contains more than 160 formulas and function shortcuts
- Support for pivot tables, freeze frames, sorting, table styles and more included
- Ability to create multiple worksheets in a single spreadsheet document
- Support different charts including bar chart, pie chart, line chart and column chart
- Ability to edit cell categories with support for number, text, percentage and more
- Supports over 1 million rows and 10K columns
- Advanced text and table formatting features
- Business edition includes support for VBA Macros
Download and Install WPS Office
WPS Office is compatible with different systems, including computers running Microsoft Windows or a Linux Distribution, as well as mobile devices running iOS or Android. Each system has it’s own version of WPS Office, and some of the versions also have different features – there’s also a premium version of WPS Office that allows you to use their more advance features by paying a monthly fee.
Microsoft Windows
To install WPS Office on Windows operating systems, including Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1, you simply need to download the installer from their website and install it on your system, it’s that simple.
NOTE: WPS Office for Windows comes in 3 different versions. The first is a free version caled the “WPS Office Home Basic Edition”. This edition includes basic versions of WPS Writer, WPS Presentation and WPS Spreadsheet, and is fully compatible with Microsoft Office documents. This version also includes a variety of free templates for each of the applications included in the Suite that can be downloaded and accessed from the landing page of each application (The first page that opens after you launch each application). If you need more features, you can upgrade to the Home Premium edition for $2.99 per month, or to the Business Edition for $4.99 per month.
More information about WPS Office for Windows: http://www.wps.com/windows/
Download WPS Office for Windows: http://www.wps.com/windows/
Linux
The installation for WPS Office on a computer running a Linux distribution will defer depending on the distribution you are using. If you are using Ubuntu, Linux Mint or any other Ubuntu-related operating system, you’ll need to download the DEB installation package for your platform (32-bit or 64-bit), whereas users running Fedora, OpenSUSE or any other linux-based operating system that uses Yum as it’s package manager will need to download the RPM installation package for their platform (32-bit or 64-bit). Other linux users can download the .tar.xz package to install on their distributions if their distribution doesn’t support installation of packages through DEB or RPM installation packages.
Users running Ubuntu, Linux-Mint or any other Ubuntu-related operating system like Deepin Linux or Zorin OS can install WPS Office 2013 by executing a few commands in a terminal window in their operating system – administrator privileges will be needed to install WPS Office 2013.
Execute the following commands if you are running a 32-bit operating system based on Ubuntu, or Ubuntu itself:
wget http://kdl.cc.ksosoft.com/wps-community/download/a16/wps-office_9.1.0.4945~a16p3_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i wps-office_9.1.0.4945~a16p3_i386.deb
If you are running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu, or a 64-bit version of an Ubuntu-related operating system, you should execute these commands:
sudo dpkg –add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update
wget http://kdl.cc.ksosoft.com/wps-community/download/a16/wps-office_9.1.0.4945~a16p3_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i wps-office_9.1.0.4945~a16p3_i386.deb
Fedora, OpenSUS, CentOS and related operating system users should execute these commands to install WPS Office 2013 on their systems:
wget http://kdl.cc.ksosoft.com/wps-community/download/a16/wps-office-9.1.0.4945-1.a16p3.i686.rpm
sudo yum localinstall wps-office-9.1.0.4945-1.a16p3.i686.rpm
rm wps-office-9.1.0.4945-1.a16p3.i686.rpm
If you are running a different version of Linux, or want to install WPS Office 2013 through a graphical interface instead, visit http://wps-community.org/download.html and download the appropriate package.
iOS
iPhone and iPad users can install WPS Office Free directly on their devices by visiting the product on the Apple Store. The download is 128MB and lets you view and edit PDFs, Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations.
Android
The Android version of WPS Office includes PDF features, and is currently the world’s #1 free office suite for Android devices. They have more than 330 Million users using WPS Office on their Android devices, and more than 660,000 reviews on Google Play.
Email Client + Contact Manager
With all the advancements in internet technology, internet access are now available to more users than ever before, thus resulting in more users having their own email accounts. Whether you have a custom email account, or using a free email account from a service such as Gmail or Yahoo, having a powerful email client installed on your computer is really useful for managing your emails, reading emails, composing new emails, flagging emails and more.
Thunderbird
No matter what you use your email account for, whether it’s personal or business, using an email client to manage your emails will make things easier, and will allow you to perform advance functions like saving emails, printing emails, adding contacts to a local address book, and more.
Thunderbird is a free and open-source email client that’s compatible with all major computer operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux Distributions.
The latest version of Thunderbird makes it easier than ever to upgrade to Thunderbird from your existing email client, by providing you with features making it easier to get started, and lets you customize your email experience and secure your emails.
Migration Assistant
The migration assistant will help you set-up Thunderbird just the way you want it, and includes options to add and remove certain features displayed by default.
Mail Account Setup Wizard
The mail account setup wizard lets you add your existing email accounts, or easily create a new email account for free using one of many different services. When setting up an email account, Thunderbird will also attempt to automatically detect the email account settings and configure everything for you.
Mail accounts supported by Thunderbird: IMAP, SMTP + SSL/TLS
One-click Address Book
Thunderbird’s powerful address book, included in the core of Thunderbird, lets you easily add people to your address book with a click of a button. The Address book is very useful for managing your contacts, and lets you easily search for specific contacts anytime you need to.
Attachment Reminder
While typing a message, the Attachment Reminder tool searches through the body of your message for words like attachment and file types, and will remind you that you might want to attach a file to your email – this way you can avoid sending multiple emails to a client just because you forgot to add an attachment.
Quick Filter Toolbar
The quick filter toolbar lets you search and filter through your emails quickly and easily. Simply start typing in the filter box and your emails will be filtered instantly, as you type.
Add-Ons
Thunderbird offers a range of powerful features in it’s core, included when you install Thunderbird by default. If these features aren’t enough for you, or you need specific features added to Thunderbird, you can install new features through Thunderbird’s Add-ons Manager, a tool designed to easily install and manage add-ons and themes installed in Thunderbird.
Junk-Filter
Thunderbird comes with a built-in junk filter to kick out those annoying junk messages and only deliver important emails to your inbox, saving you a lot of time.
Phishing Protection
Thunderbird helps to protect you from emails that might try to trick you into handing over confidential information. When an email is detected as phishing, a notification will pop up and tell you the email seems to be dangerous.
Automatic Updates
Thunderbird includes an automatic update features that will automatically check for updates to Thunderbird and install them automatically – the updates are usually small, so will only take a few seconds to install, and will help you stay updated with the latest security patches and updates all the time.
Installing Thunderbird
The installation process for Thunderbird will defer on every operating system, since Thunderbird can be installed on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux Distributions – each offering it’s own unique installation system and method for installing new software and applications.
Microsoft Windows & Mac OS X
When you visit Thunderbird’s homepage at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/, their website will automatically detect your operating system and platform, and provide you with the recommended download for your system. If you are running Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X, this is the fastest and easiest way to download Thunderbird. After downloading, simply execute the downloaded file to start the installation of Thunderbird.
Linux
Linux users have different options available for installing Thunderbird. The first would be to check if your distribution haven’t included Thunderbird as it’s default email client – access your menu and search for “Thunderbird”, if a result comes up then it means Thunderbird has already been installed on your system and you can simply launch it.
If Thunderbird wasn’t installed with the core of your Linux operating system, you can usually install it through your distribution’s software manager – the name of your software manager will defer depending on the distribution you are running.
Ubuntu users can also easily install Thunderbird by simply opening up a Terminal and executing one command:
sudo apt-get install thunderbird
This command will install Thunderbird on Ubuntu, Linux Mint or any other Ubuntu-based operating system, including Deepin Linux, Elementery OS and Zorin OS.
Fedora, OpenSUSE and CentOS users can install Thunderbird on their systems with a different command:
sudo yum install thunderbird
As with the command for Ubuntu-based operating systems, this command will install Thunderbird and all it’s required dependencies on Fedora, OpenSUSE, CentOS and other Linux distributions that uses Yum as it’s package manager.
Calender
Using a digital calender application to organize your schedule and track upcoming events, meetings and more is a useful way to keep your life organized, and be on-time for events and meetings, even if it’s family events or hangouts with your friends.
Microsoft Outlook includes a Calender feature by default, but Thunderbird, the free alternative, lacks a Calender. Luckily we have Google Calender to the rescue!
Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a very useful application that’s created by Google, and integrates with other Google services to provide a user-friendly, convenient calendar service that’s always with you, anywhere you go.
This application is online-based, and can be managed from anywhere you have internet access, whether it’s on your computer, your tablet or mobile device – they offer a system that’s cross-compatible with browsers and devices.
When adding new events to your Google Calender, they will automatically be synced with your online Google Account, and instantly become available on all your other devices that’s synced with Google. Some devices, like the iPhone, will even integrate your Google Calendar entries with it’s own time-management applications, giving you live updates and push-notifications to remind you of upcoming events and meetings.
Google Calendar also offers downloadable apps for mobile and tablet devices, which can be downloaded and installed for free from your device’s AppStore (Apple App Store, Google Play Store, Windows Store, etc). After installing Google Calendar on your mobile device, the application will ask you to log in to your Google Account and start syncing your Google Calendar entries with your device after you’ve successfully logged in. You’ll also be able to start creating new entries in your Calendar using this app, and the new entries will automatically be synced with your Google Account and displayed on all your connected devices.
Another useful feature offered by Google Calendar is the ability to make your Calendar available offline. This feature lets you continue to use Google Calendar after you’ve been disconnected from the internet, and will start syncing any new entries you made while being offline to your Google Account once you have connected and switched back to Online Mode again.
If you have a gmail email address, you already have access to Google’s Calendar application. If not, it’s quick, easy and 100% free to create your own Google Account, and you can even connect your Google Account to your domain for custom email accounts.
Access Google Calendar: https://www.google.com/calendar
Google Calendar on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.calendar&hl=en
CalenMob (Sync Google Calendar with iPhone / iPad) on Apple Store: https://itunes.apple.com/za/app/calenmob-sync-google-calendar/id514917848?mt=8
Sync Google Calendar with Windows Mobile devices: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/how-to/wp8/email-and-calendar/sync-my-calendars
Note: Users running Ubuntu or an Ubuntu-related operating system can install California, a relitavely new calendar application that’s available through a PPA for Ubuntu. The application lets you sync with your Google Calendar to import and manage your calendar easily right on your desktop. To install California on an Ubuntu or Ubuntu-related operating system, execute these commands in a terminal window, in the order they appear:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yorba/daily-builds
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install california
Conclusion
These are all amazing alternatives to Microsoft Office applications, but there’s certainly more available. If you don’t like the alternatives that’s mentioned in this article, be sure to subscribe and stay tuned for updates – we will soon do a complete comparison of more than 5 different office suites to give you more options to choose from.
