Introduction An office suite is a collection of programs, mainly consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application bundled together. With the pricey tag put onto the all popular Microsoft Office, it leaves no surprise that the average home user or small business would be looking for an alternative. Below we have reviewed and rated all the popular freeware office suites and split them into three sections making it easier to find the best solution: •, privately owned software being offered up for free. •, an open-source office suite and various mods based on the same programming code making them similar to use. •, a cloud or web based suite that can be used on the move; some contain a mobile app for easy updating. Proprietary Office Suite. Update @ November 2017 Thanks to this thread, I have learned a lot about the various free alternatives to Microsoft Office.

Download free office suite - download LibreOffice for Windows, macOS (Mac OS X), Linux. Originally based on OpenOffice.org.

My perspective here is strictly Windows-based. I have tried to stay current on this topic for the last 10 years or so, and wanted to offer my insights to bring this thread up to speed with my feedback/advice. Kingsoft / WPS: Looked very promising for a while. Early versions would read docx and xlsx files but save only back to doc or xls. Capabilities kept improving and reached their peak with Kingsoft Free 2013 9.0.1.4550 (file size 46,500KB).

This version allowed saving as docx and xlsx, but only ppt (not pptx) as I recall, and had no restrictions on printing, watermarks, or pop-up ads (unlike later WPS versions). You can still find this download at various sites online - neowin, filehippo, and WPS itself. If the filesize is larger than 46,500KB, it probably has other adware built-in, which you may or may not be able to avoid installing by unchecking a checkbox. If you can install this and somehow defeat WPS' automatic updating to newer versions, this would be a great solution for many. I thought I had accomplished this, but it updated automatically to the current WPS office version with good capabilities but annoying ads, so I gave up and uninstalled it. I wonder if one could install even earlier versions of Kingsoft without the automated updating kicking in, but if you go back much farther, you wouldn't be able to save as docx or xlsx, which is a show-stopper for me.

Apache OpenOffice: This is a stable offering, with understandable menus, fully capable of basic office needs. To my knowledge, it reads docx, xlsx, and pptx files but still can't save to those formats.

This is a show-stopper for me. LibreOffice: Forked from OpenOffice, supposedly this is progressing more quickly than Apache OpenOffice. It supposedly has better compatibility with Microsoft formats. It does allow saving to docx, xlsx, and pptx formats (by default if that's your preference, like mine).

How to open a usb on mac. Its Calc supports the vast majority of Excel's functions and formatting, and the later versions keep improving on PivotTable support. Version 5.2.7 has all the functionality I need for home use (may still not have all the latest sophisticated Excel function and PivotTable support, but I don't need that for home use). Version 5.2.7 is a very good solution for my needs. I would suggest this strongly for people's free office needs at home.

Versions 5.3 and 5.4 have new enhancements, many of which are probably desirable. Improved Microsoft compatibility, improved support of Excel functions and PivotTables, but also have a new font and page rendering engine which seem problematic for me, causing some flickering and rendering/formatting issues which I don't want to deal with; still evident even in the final release of 5.3 (5.3.7). There is apparently a setting in 5.3 to revert to the old rendering, so that might be fixable but I didn't have the patience to pursue it. I'm waiting till they address these issues in future releases.