About a week ago I featured Kingsoft Office Suite Professional 2012 in a bonus deal. Since then I've been test-driving the software on an old laptop. And you know what? I like it!
- Free Office Program For My Computer
- Free Office Programs For Mac
- Is There A Free Office Program For Windows 10
LibreOffice is a good freeware that is a good free replacement to MS office for MAC. It performs about all the basic features of a basic MS Office application. It performs about all the basic features of a basic MS Office application.
I mention this because although the Kingsoft Professional giveaway is over, you can still get Kingsoft Office Suite Free 2012 for, well, free. Update: This program is for Windows.
WPS Office Free is a slimmed down version of a premium office suite, but you'd hardly know it. Each of its three programs looks just as slick as the latest versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. OpenOffice.org is both an Open Source product and a project. The product is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. The free download allows you to use Outlook and the other Office 365 programs for 30 days on up to five Macs or PCs, and Office mobile apps on up to five tablets and five phones. You will get up to 1 TB of cloud storage per user for up to five users. Office 2016 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, InfoPath, Publisher, and Skype. Your school may offer Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016 or Office 365 ProPlus at no cost. Search for your school below to claim this academic deal.
Free Office Program For My Computer
Until last week, I'd never heard of Kingsoft or this product. I had, however, tried all the usual freebie Microsoft Office alternatives: OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Lotus Symphony, Google Docs, and so on.
They're all OK--good enough, certainly, for most users--but I'll admit I've become spoiled by Microsoft's Ribbon interface, which made its debut in Office 2007 and carried over to Office 2010. The famed freebies mostly resemble Office 2003--if not an even earlier version.
Kingsoft Office looks a lot like Office 2010, and consequently I feel right at home in it. (Update: Only the Pro version gives you the option of an Office 2010-style interface. My apologies for the error.) A few commenters last week accused it of being a 'Chinese rip-off,' but last time I checked, software created in China wasn't inherently bad. (By the way, Kingsoft is actually based in Hong Kong.)
What's more, the developers may have borrowed heavily from Microsoft's user interface, but so did the developers of OpenOffice and similar suites; they just borrowed from an older Microsoft UI.
Maybe I'm over-rationalizing, but the fact is that I like the look of Kingsoft Office Suite 2012, and I like the price even more. The free version is extremely capable, offering robust counterparts to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint--and file compatibility with all three. It doesn't support Visual Basic or macros, however, so if you're a power user, you might want to consider the $69.95 Pro version, which adds those features (among others).
Also, you don't have to take my word for it; find out why CNET staffers rated Kingsoft Office 2012 4.5 stars out of 5.
Another reason I'm jazzed about this suite is that I'm increasingly dissatisfied with Microsoft Office--and not just the ridiculous price tag. On my Core i7 system, Office 2010 takes forever to load. And don't get me started on Outlook.
Thus, I'm shopping for replacements, and Kingsoft Office Suite 2012 has emerged as one of my top picks for taking over Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It's compact, fast, attractive, and, from what I've seen so far, totally file-compatible. Also, it's free. What have you got to lose by giving it a try?
After you do, leave a comment letting me know if you like the suite as much as I do.
Bonus deal: If you're a Kindle or Nook owner, check out eBookFling. It's a kind of matchmaking service that lets you borrow e-books for cheap/free. You get one 'borrow' credit free for signing up; others are earned by lending your own e-books or just buying credits outright. It's not perfect (far too many books are lending-disabled by the publisher), but it's still a great way to score some mainstream books without having to buy them.
Old habits definitely do die hard, which is probably why I have dutifully pulled out the Microsoft Office for Mac (OfM) install disk every time I've reformatted or upgraded one of the many Macs I've set up and kept running over the years.
When recently setting up a new iMac with Mavericks and I couldn't locate that OfM install disk, however, an act of desperation turned into a new modus operandi after I realised that our open-source allies have made the world's most widely used office suite nearly irrelevant.
There has been a lot of movement in the office-suite market of late, what with Apple releasing Pages, Keynote and Numbers for free; Google Docs popular but still outage-prone; and Microsoft's Office 365 gaining momentum even as the company puts free versions of Office in the cloud to varying effect.
While cloud-based alternatives are getting better all the time, I'm a traditionalist who has used local productivity applications since the days of Wordstar. So, as you can imagine, when I set up a new computer I like to have a writing tool that works whether I'm online or not.
Previous versions of iWork had promise as an alternative, but I have a long-running feud with Apple over iWork for one simple reason: Apple refuses to give it the ability to simply load and save files in Word's .DOC format.
That's right: the only way to handle documents in Pages is by saving your working documents as .pages files – which are, inexplicably, often 10 or more times larger than their Word .DOC equivalent – and then exporting .DOC versions as and when you need them.
If you work with a lot of documents, the double-handling rapidly grates on you. I was hoping to standardise on Pages after hearing about Apple's move to make it free, but Apple is still insisting that we use its own file format to save documents.
Little wonder the business community has been increasingly abandoning Pages and iWork: in the real world – the business world outside Apple's closed-garden ecosystem –absolutely nobody uses the .pages format. Apple's determination to force it down our throats has made its latest iWork iteration less of an Office killer and something more resembling TextEdit on steroids.
At any rate, with Pages out of the question and Office nowhere to be found, I took a chance and revisited the open-source equivalent, OpenOffice, to see if it might allow me to maintain my workflow based on the frequent loading, editing and saving of .DOC files.
OpenOffice has been around for some time, but despite heroic efforts by its developers it has struggled to gain a massive following mainly because Microsoft Office is so broadly available. Business users know Office and have it available to them as a matter of course, while home users probably get it through student bundles or the like.
![Free Office Program For Mac Laptop Free Office Program For Mac Laptop](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126392725/540157561.png)
Mac users, however, have a different decision set. Despite its name, Office for Mac is a rather different productivity suite than Office for Windows – with a different interface and a different feature set. These differences are often significant: it was only with the latest version, for example, that the Mac version of Office was given Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripting capabilities after years of conspicuous absence.
Rumour has it that the next version of Office for Mac will bow early next year – prompting many to upgrade, no doubt, even as the memory of now-unsupported Office 2008 fades. But if you can't wait that long – or, like me, you find yourself without an OfM install disk – it's time to give OpenOffice another look.
I had tried it a few versions ago but found it woefully underfeatured as a replacement for OfM. But with its latest iteration (v4.0), OpenOffice is not only extremely quick and easy to use; thanks to ongoing improvements and the contribution of a large volume of code from IBM's Symphony, it's compatible and close enough to Office that you may not even notice you're in the new environment.
Certainly, for someone with very specific requirements – all I need to do is be able to edit documents, save and send .DOC files, and use tools like the highlighter and word counts – OpenOffice ticks all the boxes.
I have found it to be a simple-to-use, capable alternative to Word that costs nothing and offers more than enough features and flexibility that it probably does everything you need it to. It even has Pages' contextual sidebars.
If you have several Macs in the family, this may make OpenOffice not only curious but absolutely compelling because of its much lower cost.
Sure, I've made a few changes: for example, using Mac OS X's application-specific keystrokes I have set up a few keyboard shortcuts for functions like Format Paragraph (Shift-Command-M) and Word Count (if you don't know how to do this, go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Application Shortcuts, then click +, choose your application, enter the unique text of the menu item you want the keystroke to start, and then the keystroke you want to use).
Play around with it and you'll find that the latest OpenOffice gives you more than enough room to stretch your arms and get to work. The spreadsheet and presentation modules are so similar to Excel and PowerPoint – the Mac versions, at least – that you may never know you're not using the real thing.
This is not meant to be a primer on OpenOffice, as much as a reminder that it is still out there, and in its latest iteration it is better than ever.
That may be good news for its authors, since figures suggest that OpenOffice is not exactly burning up the charts; a recent Forrester survey suggested that only 6 percent of companies offer their employees an alternative to Microsoft Office.
As I mentioned earlier, favourable enterprise licensing terms mean most people don't have any need for OpenOffice; recent figures suggest 16 percent of businesses will upgrade to Office 2013 within a year and 20 percent more in the long term.
Free Office Programs For Mac
This is great news for Microsoft and Windows users. But if you're a Mac user who can't or won't buy OfM – or are just looking for an easier and faster productivity option – give it a try. You may find, like I did, that the days of installing massive, monolithic applications are simply over.
What do you think? Have you switched to OpenOffice? Did you try it and discover it was underpowered for your needs? Or am I already late to the party?