Documentation plays an important role in day-to-day activity of any business or individual. We use a Word Processor for creating letters, Spreadsheet application for keeping a track of household or business expenses and a Presentation application which is used to create beautiful slides for meetings/presentations. We have lots of Office suites in the market today which combine all these applications and many others into one, providing you with a powerful package for all your documentation needs.
Microsoft Office is a paid and popular all-in-one office application with a large number of PC users around the world. But all the PC users do not need to stick to a particular application only because everyone else is using it. There are many freely (some are open source too) available Office suites which come with powerful features and can get your work done as easily as Microsoft Office.
Free alternatives to Microsoft Office
For Desktop/PC
Although there is a wide variety of Office suites available for desktop, we are going to cover two of the famous products here. First is Libreoffice which is available for Linux/Unix, Mac and Windows platforms. The second one is Kingsoft office, which is only available for Windows OS at the time of writing this post.
LibreOffice
Official Website : www.libreoffice.org
Type : Freeware/Open Source
OS : Linux, Mac, Windows
LibreOffice is a community-driven and developed software which is a project of a not-for-profit organization. Being open sourced helps LibreOffice to be stable, high quality and available for free of cost. The LibreOffice suite comes packed with Writer – a Document editor, Calc – a spreadsheet application, Presentation for making presentations and Math for building equation.
LibreOffice Calc
LibreOffice Math
Kingsoft Office
Official Website : www.kingsoftstore.com
Type : Freeware/Paid
OS: Windows
If you are familiar with Microsoft Office interface, then you will feel at home with Kingsoft office suite. The Kingsoft office comes in two versions; one is free but another one is paid. Paid version has added options for saving documents in various formats.
Kingsoft Presentation
Kingsoft Spreadsheet
Kingsoft Office Writer
Cloud Based Services
When it comes to the choice of Cloud-based office suites, users do not have a lot of options to choose from. Still Google Docs and Microsoft Skydrive are the famous one which are worth a mention.
Google Drive
Website : drive.google.com
Google drive helps you to helps to create, edit and save the documents in the cloud, so that it can be accessed from anywhere in the world. All you need is a Google account to get started with. Google Drive comes with the option of Document Editor, a Spreadsheet, presentation and image drawing tool.
Google Docs Spreadsheet
Google Docs Presentation
Google Docs Document
Skydrive
Website : skydrive.live.com
Microsoft Skydrive is best cloud-hosted alternative for Microsoft Office, if you are not an enthusiastic Google account user. It is an exact replica of MS Office and the service is freely available. The service comes with Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote.
Sky Drive Word
Sky Drive Power Point
Sky Drive One Note
Sky Drive Excel
Android Apps
Viewing and editing documents on-the-go is not an easy job. Although there are many option available for an Office suite on Android, we are covering the 2 most popular apps – Quick Office and Kingsoft Office.
Quickoffice
Play Store Address : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quickoffice.android
Quickoffice is an official app from Google Inc. It includes a Document editor, a spreadsheet application and a presentation app. Signing with Google account will help you to save your documents for free over cloud storage, which can later be accessed from any device.
Quick Office Document Viewer
Kingsoft Office
Play Store Address : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cn.wps.moffice_eng
We have mentioned about Kingsoft Office in Windows category. The application brings the same awesomeness to Android platform too. The Office suite for Android comes with Document editor, PDF Viewer, Spreadsheet and Presentation editor.
Kingsoft Office Android Presentation
Kingsoft office Android Writer
Kingsoft Office Android Interface
Kingsoft Office Android Spreadsheet
The scope of alternative apps to Microsoft Office on every platform is very huge and we might have missed a few good ones. Please let us know via comments
Credits : Kingsoft Office for Images of Kingsoft Office For Android