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tyoungs's avatar
tyoungs
Explorer
Dec 20, 2018

open source alternative to MS Office

Just got new laptop and previously wife's work IT folks loaded MS Office to our home computer. They can't do that this time (new owners) and so I am looking for suggestions on alternative to paying full boat for MS Office. We have files for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Publisher. What do you suggest for alternative.
Thanks in advance,

32 Replies

  • Guesa you did not do a web search. This turned up three different places with a 10 second search


    While Microsoft Office dominates the productivity app sector there are many flexible alternatives. In this guide, you'll learn more about some of them.

    Many free and open source suites such as LibreOffice support the Open Document Format, which is used by the UK government. Open standards are useful as when developers discontinue software, users may not be able to access documents stored in a proprietary format. This has happened in the past to former users of Microsoft Works.

    If you manage an organisation, you may be unable to pay for MS Office software licenses for every machine. For this reason all the products discussed here are available free of charge, or offer a free tier such as WPS Office.

    Some of the tools in this guide also incorporate useful features not found in Microsoft Office, like converting PDFs to DOC format. All of the suites listed below can both open and save Microsoft Office documents such as DOCX, XLSX and PPTX.

    We've also highlighted the best free word processor of 2018
  • Apache OpenOffice is the only one I know of. I used it for a while but reverted back to MS Office.

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