WPS Office: Free alternative to Microsoft Office

WPS Office earlier known as Kingsoft Office is a free Office suite that lets you perform your daily office tasks easily. It is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. WPS Office is available for Windows, Linux, Android and iOS. The multi-platform engine has helped WPS Office to gain considerable popularity. WPS Office is far better than its previous versions of Kingsoft – it has been fully revamped to meet the modern requirements of an office user. It has got a new name, a new design, and new features – but still  is free of cost. In this post we will discuss about the features of WPS Office 2013.

Free alternative to Microsoft Office

WPS Office may be a competitor to Microsoft Office, but it shows full support to the Microsoft Office formats like DOC, XLS, PPT, etc. – and you know that’s the part of competition, as support to these formats may force some Microsoft Office users, who cannot afford to upgrade to newer versions, to shift to this free alternative.

The suite includes three applications, Writer, Presentation and Spreadsheet.

WPS Office Writer

Writer is the feature-filled component of the suite supporting all the common formats – similar to Word. You can use Writer for writing your school projects, creating a resume or just anything. Writer even allows you to add word-arts, text fields, headers, footers and etc. You can even add charts, symbols and equations.

WPS Office Presentation

Talking about the Presentation component of the suite, it lets you create presentations and even present them using the slide show feature. It comes with nine preloaded designs and you can download more from their website. Presentation supports animations and transitions. It is what PowerPoint is, in Microsoft Office.

WPS Office Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets is the most useful and important component of the suite. Like Excel, you can create workbooks with more than one sheet. It comes with all the important features like auto sum, merging the cells, formulas, sorting, etc.

You can seamlessly edit more than one files with the help of priority tabbing feature. Unlike Microsoft Office, you can open more than one files in the same window so that you can easily navigate between multiple files. You can of course, add this feature to Microsoft Office using Office Tabs.

The UI of the applications in somewhat similar to Microsoft Office’s. If you’ve been previously using Microsoft Office, then you may not face much difficulties in using WPS too. The UI is easy to use and includes three skins preloaded. Out of them, two are modern skins and one is the classic-styled skin. You can switch skins as you wish.

With WPS Office, you can quickly share the documents using the built in emailing feature. It tries to keep your work as safe as possible by creating automatic backups of the file, this feature is also known as Auto-Save in Microsoft Office. The program also supports document encryption, so that you can protect your documents against misuse or thefts.

Overall, WPS is a good free alternative to Microsoft Office, and can do almost every task that can be done with Microsoft Office. The 45-MB setup did more than what I expected. Since it is available for mobile platforms too, you can open your WPS documents on mobiles without any chances of losing data or effects. Though it is not available for Windows Phone, but we expect the company must be working for the most upcoming mobile platform.

WPS Office free download

Click here to download WPS Office. Worked just fine on Windows 8.1 too.