7. WPS Office – Writer
If OpenOffice is a Microsoft Office substitute, then WPS Office essentially apes the entire experience almost beat for beat.
The collection of software, previously known as Kingsoft Office, doesn’t offer as many applications like Microsoft, but the ones it does have are the big ones – and they’re fully featured, too. Writer, Presentation, and Spreadsheets are Word, Powerpoint, and Excel in all but name, but there are some additional features that make WPS Office well worth a look if you want to save yourself the price of a Microsoft 365 subscription.
For one, there’s a cloud-based system that lets you start working on one computer and pick up where you left off on the iPhone or iPad app. That also enables collaboration in real-time for premium users, like the kind you’d see in Google Docs or similar, making it ideal for editing content or mapping out ideas for a project.
It’ll also open and edit files from other word processing apps, and can export to a variety of file types, too, including PDF. On the subject of PDFs, it can also replace Preview as your default reader, although you’ll get more functionality with the paid membership.
That’ll set you back $29.99/£23.22 per year, but opens up full file conversions and 20GB of Cloud Storage. Sadly, you’ll need to spend that to avoid ads, which are how the developer is able to monetize the free version.
And yet, even with that caveat, WPS Office is a great package with a sleek interface that falls somewhere between Microsoft Office and Google Docs, and a powerful word processor that contains the best of both.
