WPS Office Free 12.2.0.20326

Winner of Best Office Suite in 2017 and 2014.

Overview

WPS Office Suite Free is a complete office suite for all your writing, presentation and data handling needs. It contains 3 programs and each one is used for a different purpose: Writer; which is a modern word processor, Presentation; which is used when you want to make a neat presentation of multimedia project, and Spreadsheets; which is a data processing program. These 3 programs cover all aspects of writing, presenting and data manipulation, thus making this suite a great software package.

Installation

You don’t need to have any particular technical skills to install this software. Just run the installer and follow the instructions to complete setup. In one of the steps you will be asked if you want to include the Template Files in the installation, so uncheck them if you don’t want to. A few steps afterwards the main installation will begin. When it finishes, you will be prompted to make some final settings, such as associating file types with the suite’s programs.

Supported operating systems: Windows 2000, XP, Vista (32 & 64-bit), 7 (32 & 64-bit), 8 (32 & 64-bit), 10 (32 & 64-bit).

Interface

All 3 programs have the same look and feel with their Microsoft Office 2003 counterparts. They have many toolbars at the top, and loads of options in every menu. Each program can open multiple files in tabs, without having to open multiple instances of itself. In Writer, the center area of the program is dedicated to writing, and next to that is a pane with all the recent documents that have been opened. Spreadsheets and Presentation have the same pane as well, and if you want to remove it you can easily do so. Presentation has a pane on the left too, which gives you an overview of all the slides.

Pros

It can open all sorts of MS Office documents without problems. The fact that none of the programs had trouble opening any of the files we tested is a big plus. They are fast as well, and can open big files in no time. Being lightweight is another one of their advantages, since their interface doesn’t depend on graphics a lot but rather on the attractiveness of simplicity.

Basically most of the features from MS Office products are available in every program, like automatic spell check, font customization, paragraph adjustment, document encryption etc. You can also save the open documents as PDF files.

Cons

If you are an advanced user and want to use macros or other advanced functions, then unfortunately the free version is not enough for you.

Alternatives

OpenOffice (free) is what you could say the most popular alternative to MS Office, and sequentially, to WPS Office Suite. There are 6 programs included in this package: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base and Math. Comparing OpenOffice’s Writer, Impress and Calc to WPS’ Writer, Presentation and Spreadsheets respectively, their differences lie in their interface rather than in their features.

Conclusion

If you want to ditch MS Office and try something new, no need to start searching the web indefinitely. WPS Office is what you should try out first, and you will probably stick with it for a long time.