How to Get Microsoft Office for Free
Microsoft now includes its Office products in a Microsoft 365 subscription. Microsoft 365 Personal includes access to all Office programs, plus 1 TB of OneDrive storage. But it also costs $69.99 per year for individuals and $100 for a family plan. And now Microsoft has a new plan called Microsoft 365 Basic , which gives you access to all Office apps as well as 100GB of OneDrive storage for $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year, which is a step in the right direction.
But what if you don’t want to pay for Office at all? What if you use it occasionally or can’t afford a subscription? There are several legitimate ways to access Microsoft Office applications such as PowerPoint, Word, and Excel for free.
Microsoft 365 Education is free for students and teachers.
If you’re a student or teacher, Microsoft will give you the entire package, including Teams and classroom tools, for free, as long as you’re an employee of the qualifying school. All you need to do is enter your school’s official email address on the Microsoft Office Education page to get started. If your domain is verified, you will be given access to Office tools using an automatic authentication process. But if your institution still needs verification, it can take up to a month to set up your account.
There are some caveats here, and Microsoft isn’t entirely clear on how things work. If your school meets the criteria, you can get started. However, it appears that other than Microsoft Teams and OneDrive, you’ll only have the free Office web app available to you. In other cases, your school may not be eligible for any of this.
In these cases, Microsoft offers a discount of $2.99 per month to all college students with a valid college email address. This subscription includes all Office products plus 1TB of OneDrive storage space, which would typically cost you $6.99 per month.
How to use Office apps online for free
If you’re not a student, you can still access Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Calendar, My Content, Skype, Designer and Clipchamp for free.
First, go to the Microsoft 365 site . Here, click the “Sign up for a free version of Office” button if this is your first time using a Microsoft product. If you already have a Microsoft account, click the Sign In button instead.
This opens the Microsoft 365 online portal with convenient options for creating a new Word document, PowerPoint presentation, Excel workbook, and more. You can press any button to start.
Then select the app you want to work with and it will open instantly. All your work will be automatically saved to your OneDrive account.
While these Office apps are indeed free, there’s one catch: they’re not the full desktop version you’re used to. You only have access to the web version of each app, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. These web applications are reliable and contain the most important features for each application, so you can do all your daily work in these applications. In fact, collaboration features are still available here. The downside, of course, is that they only work in the browser, so you’ll need an active internet connection.
If you want the Office desktop apps, you can always get a one-month free trial of Microsoft 365 by entering your credit card information. Just remember to cancel your subscription before you are charged.
Microsoft Office Alternatives
If you think the online version of Microsoft Office is limited or just finicky, there are other free options.
Google Workspace
Although Google Workspace is completely available online, it can serve as a full-fledged replacement for Microsoft Office for free. All functions for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations are available online, as well as excellent collaboration capabilities. What Google Workspace lacks in functionality can be made up for through add-ons and APIs, where third-party developers offer additional functionality beyond the basic ones.
FreeOffice
If you miss the old days of Microsoft Office, when you bought software and it stayed the same for years, running reliably, you might like FreeOffice. FreeOffice can open all your Microsoft Office files for free, and the interface is very closely related to Microsoft Office applications. It won’t be as feature-rich as Microsoft 365, but if you want a simple and compatible set of apps for personal and work use, FreeOffice may be just what you need.
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is an open source product developed by the community and completely free to use. It supports many Office formats. Since the app is open source, it has an active community that constantly updates the app, ensuring it runs smoothly as new versions of Windows and macOS are released.
LibreOffice has a customizable interface. This is his greatest strength, but also his weakness. If you enjoy customizing applications and user interfaces, you’ll love customizing LibreOffice the way you want. But if you’re the type of person who likes a plug-and-play experience, the interface itself can be annoying. In this case, we suggest you use FreeOffice or the next option on the list.
Apache OpenOffice
Think of OpenOffice as LibreOffice’s more mature cousin. It is also open source and has a long standing reputation in the industry. But it has a much slower development cycle and fewer additional features. OpenOffice gets the basics right and sticks to them. If you want a more traditional office suite with knowledge supported by an open source community, Apache OpenOffice is a good choice for you.