Microsoft Office has dominated the productivity suite department for long. But often, Microsoft has its limitations such as providing trial versions of Microsoft Office even though you get a new machine, product code expiry or unavailability of certain features.
All these limitations provide an un-streamlined user experience and cause frustration. Fortunately, the internet and the market are full of even better Microsoft Office alternatives which offer a much better user experience and also have great unconventional features that can be very useful at times.
In this article, we list out our best five alternatives for Microsoft Office.
Also read:Â 5 free alternatives to Adobe Photoshop
Bit.ai
Bit.ai is a modern age office suite that has a cloud-based document management system. It helps a large number of people create, manage and track documents.
Bit allows various teams to collaborate on workplace documents like project proposals, sales decks, how-to guides, media kits, case studies, e-books, etc. Bit’s document editor enables you to add various types of digital content that can live inside of your documents like Airtable databases, Google Spreadsheets, Typeform, code blocks, math equations, Twitter tweets, and much more.
Except for documents, Bit also gives access to amazing content management capabilities. Bit has a content library that automatically saves the images, files and digital content you add to your documents (or workspaces) so that you can access and reuse them easily.
Supported Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
Download Size: No download needed.
OpenOffice
OpenOffice, made by US-based Apache Software Foundation, is an open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. A true open source and free software tool, OpenOffice allows anyone to report bugs, request new features, or enhance the software.
They appreciate all sorts of feedback and work on it to roll out new features every major update to the suite. It is multi-lingual and works on all low specification computers too.
According to their website, “It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages.”
Supported Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
Download Size: 150 MB (Approx)
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is a free and open source Microsoft Office alternative, built and supported by millions of community members worldwide. If you are one of those people who loved Word before its famed ribbon interface, LibreOffice might be the tool for you.
It has an old school interface and is widely used all around the world. It provides simple user experience and can be labelled one of the most used Microsoft alternatives. LibreOffice has a versatile office suite including apps like Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Math (formula editing).
All majorly accepted document formats are supported by this suite.
Available Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
Download Size: 250 MB (Approx.)
WPS Office
WPS stands for Writer Spreadsheets and Presentation which are similar to MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint respectively.
WPS Office suite is offered by Kingsoft Office which is a HongKong based software company. There are some handy features such as inbuilt PDF conversion, document encryption, signature, and tabbed document editing. It supports Android mobile devices too.
WPS Office can open almost all the different document file formats including Microsoft standard file formats. The only con that comes with the WPS Office suite is that the free version is ad-supported and shows some ads which you can remove for 30 minutes by watching an ad video.
Supported Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android
Download Size: 80 MB (Approx.)
Polaris Office
With this suite, you can edit many different file formats including PPT, XLS, DOCX, and HWP. As your account synchronises amongst your devices, you will be able to edit and create from wherever you are, on the go.
All your data is secured by AWS (Amazon Web Services). With the latest edition of Polaris, you can now convert and edit PDF documents. Users can also convert voice and image files to documents if required.
Note: If you install the Windows version, keep an eye out for some bundled software that might get installed alongwith Polaris Office. You can avoid downloading these by choosing ‘custom installation’.
Supported Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS
Download Size: 70 MB (Approx.)
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