There are many, many office suite programs available, and not all of them cost money. In fact, some of the best suites for home, student, or small business use are free. Although they aren't usually quite as full-featured or always as stable as Microsoft Office, they're all more than capable enough for the average user who just needs to be able to type a business report or term paper.



OpenOffice is probably the most talked-about and most popular free office suite available. It's an open-source program, which means that anyone with some programming skill can contribute to it. OpenOffice's Writer word processor handles Word documents with ease, and can even export its own files as Word documents.

LibreOffice is an outgrowth of OpenOffice that natively supports Microsoft's Open XML protocol (whereas OpenOffice requires a free plug-in to handle it). It's fairly new, but powerful and well-regarded. Most of OpenOffice's development team now develops for LibreOffice instead.

IBM Lotus Symphony was developed by IBM using OpenOffice as a starting point. It's sleek and fast, and can do almost everything OpenOffice can do.
 In addition to traditional software packages you can download and use offline, there are a number of powerful word processing and office options available for use online, some of which are free. The advantage of these is that your work is always wherever you need it to be.



Microsoft's own OneDrive cloud storage actually has a free, full version of Office for personal use available entirely online. You can type, format, save to your hard drive, and even print documents from OneDrive's Word Web App. The only restriction is that you can't use it for a group – not even a very small group like a family business. Just sign up to OneDrive and access Word from a drop-down menu near the top of the home page.

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is designed more for groups (such as businesses and nonprofit organizations) than individual, but there's no restriction on individual use. It's a free, open source, comprehensive wiki management tool that includes a powerful online office suite along with a dazzling array of other tools you may or may not find useful.

ThinkFree Online is a sleek, graphically pleasing free online office suite with basic functions including a word processor and a spreadsheet program. It's compatible with many devices, and offers viewing and direct editing modes for quick document manipulation without logging into the full online program, if you're in a hurry.
Get a free suite.
Use an online alternative.
{"src": "wikihow-all_test", "title": "How to Download Microsoft Word3"}