If your PC or laptop doesn’t come pre-installed with Microsoft Word, splashing out money for the Microsoft Office suite may be something you’d rather avoid, however if you often rely on Word processors like I do, you’ll know that it’s important to find a high-functioning and reliable replacement. Fortunately, there are many great free Word alternatives available today, some of which could even be considered better than Word itself. Below I’ve listed my favorite free web based and free software replacements for Word.
OpenOffice
OpenOffice is perhaps on of the best desktop based free world alternatives out there, and it comes with a range of useful word processor tools. As well as supporting written documents, OpenOffice has spreadsheets, powerpoint-like presentations and other useful data and office-based tools.
The great thing about OpenOffice is that it is completely free and open source, so it’s very much controlled by the community, and there are many useful extensions to make OpenOffice more streamlined and effective.
Google Docs
My personal favorite is Google Docs – this is a web based document processor that can be accessed via drive.google.com and is tied to your Google account. Google Docs is absolutely perfect for those who work from multiple devices or locations, as all files can be accessed by simply logging into your Google account. Whilst you can pay for more storage space, you’ll ever enough free space to last a very long time, especially if you are only going to use the basic office tools such as Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets or Google Presentations.
WordPad
If you don’t have access to the internet, WordPad is one of the best free word alternatives that is typically pre-installed to every version of Windows – whilst WordPad may have some slight compatibility issues with certain document files, it’s easy to edit documents similarly to Microsoft Word, and documents can be saved to many different file formats. I’ve been surprised at how many times WordPad has been useful since I learned about it’s existence.
Kingsoft Office
Kingsoft Office is basically the Chinese Microsoft Word clone, and whilst it may not perfectly simulate Word, it does a pretty good job at it, and for free too. If there are certain features any of the other free Word alternatives lack, it’s best to give Kingsoft Office a try, because it is a fully-fledged software that comes with many features similar to Microsoft Office.
Zoho
Zoho is another online web app that is useful for creating documents and managing other office based applications such as email, book keeping and data reports. Zoho is perhaps not the most streamlined experience, but it has a wide range of features making it a great place to frequent if you regularly manage multiple types of office file formats.