It’s my opinion that there are only a hand full of users that should purchase Office 365 despite all the pressure to do just that. These days there are so many alternatives to MS Office many of them free.
These alternatives are sometimes free and opensource programs, but many come straight from Microsoft.
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is a free and opensource office sweet that was forked from Open Office in 2010. Since then its popularity has really taken off. It has all of the tools MS Office has LibreOffice; a word-processer Writer, a spreadsheet program call Calc, Impress for presentations (like PowerPoint), Draw is a diagram creator like MS Visio, Base is a database program like MS Access, last but not least, Math which is a mathematical formula editor (I don’t know the MS Office equivalent if any.)
LibreOffice is compatible with a wide range of document formats such as Microsoft® Word (.doc, .docx), Excel (.xls, .xlsx), PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx) and Publisher. But LibreOffice goes much further with its native support for a modern and open standard, the Open Document Format (ODF). With LibreOffice, you have maximum control over your data and content – and you can export your work in many different formats including PDF.
OpenOffice is still available but it has fallen behind since loosing many developers to LibreOffice.
Office 365
Office 365 online free is a free version of the 365 online applications. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Forms, MS To Do, OneDrive, Designer, Clipchamp, OneDrive, Calendar, Teams and Outlook (webmail).
I am very partial to the MS web applications. They are very functional. The applications are similar to the desktop experience. Good Job Microsoft!
Other Alternatives
There are many options when your talking about an office suite. They all can’t be listed in this post, but a few are :
- OnlyOffice
- MPS Office
- Google Apps
- SoftMaker Free Office
- Many, many more…
Good-N-Free Meetup 