Off brand microsoft word

It has almost all the same power functions mail-merge, Web format output and shortcut keys as Office, and none of the ribbon interface that drives many Office users crazy. Zoho is Google Docs with a few more bells and whistles, but not enough to be a full-time Office displacer. Winner: Zoho — Zoho has all the online sharing, user-control, and collaboration features that Google Docs brings to bear, but with more features and a nicer interface.

Pass: Google Docs, OpenOffice 3. Both shine in areas where Office is still getting its feet wet. Symphony has some potential here, especially with its integrated Web browser and widgets, but it simply feels half-baked and incomplete.

OpenOffice is the MS Office alternative that has the most support, which explains why it has such a robust feature set and can give MS Office a run for its money in almost every category besides integration with SharePoint or SQL servers both Microsoft products, naturally.

Until they get there, OpenOffice 3. It serves as a good replacement for MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint, while providing the utility to avoid incompatibility issues across various operating system platforms. Furthermore, it offers numerous useful tools such as spell checker, calculator, graphics and more. IBM Lotus Symphony works on the following platforms:. When it comes to uploading, creating and editing Office files via the cloud, Google Drive comes to mind.

Formerly known as Google Docs, Google Drive is one of the most famous services used for creating and editing Microsoft Office compatible documents. Google Drive can not only be accessed online via a browser but also has desktop applications for a variety of operating systems. While Microsoft has its own cloud service similar to Google Drive, known as Office , many people prefer Google Drive as it is free to use.

You can find out more from our Comprehensive Review of Google Drive. View other posts by Farshad ». Both are solid choices for those looking for a free alternative to Microsoft Word, and selecting one over the other largely comes down to preference. One aspect of LibreOffice stands out, and it isn't what's in the app--it's the community-driven nature of the platform.

Collaborating with users and developers to improve the product is front and center on LibreOffice's website, and that focus has grown LibreOffice into a thriving community of users and coders that keep making it better.

If you want a word processor that's just as feature packed as Word, but you don't want to pay a premium, check out WPS Office Writer. WPS Office Writer does most of the same things as Microsoft Word, and it includes native cloud support to make storing documents online a snap; however, it does lack real-time collaboration.

With its inclusion of more features than other free suites like OpenOffice, this might be the one to go for--especially considering you don't have to pay for it. With anything free and high quality, there's a catch, and you might be able to guess what it is in our modern age of "freemium" apps: Ads.

Don't let that dissuade you from trying WPS Writer--you might not see an ad. There's no banner across the top of the app--ads only appear when you want to use select features like printing or exporting to PDF. If you need to do one of those things, you'll have to sit through a roughly second ad, which unlocks the feature for 30 minutes.

Don't overlook Microsoft's free alternative to the paid version of Word: Office Online. It lacks a lot of the advanced features of a locally-installed version of Word, but for users who want a free version of Word, this is as close as you can get. Similarities between Google Docs and Word Online are present all the way down to the interface, but with a few tweaks to make it feel more like the Microsoft ribbon instead of the drop-down menus Google Docs users are used to.

Documents created in Word Online are saved in Microsoft OneDrive, and real-time collaboration features like those in Google Docs are available as well. One big plus in Word Online's favor is formatting: If you create a document in Word Online and then import it to a local version of Microsoft Word, it's going to retain the formatting way better than if it's made in Google Docs. Brandon is a Staff Writer for TechRepublic.