Microsoft Office continues to be the one of the most popular productivity suite for writing documents, creating spreadsheets, and presenting presentations. If you prefer to access it in the cloud rather than download it, you'll find that it features powerful tools such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access, Publisher, and Outlook. Alternative competitors, including those with less expensive licensing fees and free offerings, have become very attractive over the last few years. It is true, however, that open-source communities can confirm that paying fewer, or nothing, does not necessarily imply lower quality software.

However, there may be problems with sharing documents among different office suite platforms, which can be a real problem. If you have to share or collaborate on documents with other operators who use unalike office suites, be sure the alternative you choose has no shortfalls that might restrict your use of it. Using the office alternative standalone shouldn't cause any issues, but if you decide to change to a different software suite it's something you should keep in mind.

Few products can compete with Office 365 in terms of productivity suites. Using Office 365, Microsoft gives customers the freedom to work online and off.

·     WPS OFFICE

With the launch of WPS Office in 2016, the software has become an increasingly popular tool. In comparison to Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, WPS Office's free version offers Writer, Presentation, and Spreadsheets options. A PDF to Word converter is built into WPS Office as well, supporting bulk conversion. Users of WPS Office can also store all their documents in a cloud storage account with up to 1GB of storage capacity. Among the platforms supported by the app are Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. In the free version, users are sometimes bombarded with ads, which is the only downside. The productivity suite does not support collaboration as well as Google's.

·      GOOGLE DOCS, SHEETS, AND SLIDES

You can use Google's work suite instead of downloading additional productivity software if you don't want to download anything else. You can make presentations with Google Slides, Google Sheets, and Google Docs, a word processor, and spreadsheet editor.

Templates are available for you to customize in order to meet your specific needs. In order to benefit from Google's services, all users are required is a web browser and internet access. In addition, Google's productivity suite supports both old and new document formats, so your old files have no need to be re-created.

·      OFFICE ONLINE

When you don't want to stick with Microsoft products, Office Online can also be a great alternative. Using your Microsoft account, you can access it from within your web browser. It functions in a similar way to Google's office suite. The current Office Online version includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote. The files which are stored on OneDrive or your PC can be edited just as in Google Docs and Sheets.

For most work needs, the open-source software Only Office will suffice. Among its great features is its possibility of collaboration with other users. All changes can be seen in real-time as well as comments to promote a more effective workflow. You can add more functionality to your presentations by downloading plugins that offer different features including YouTube videos, clipart, and even a text-to-speech converter.