We've also featured the best Microsoft Office alternatives. Here then are the best free word processors and alternatives to Microsoft Word that will provide a reliable platform for you to work from, at home or in the office.

However, it has a limited selection of templates, there’s no way to import content from other Google applications, it suffers from the formatting issues when importing mentioned above, and any online tool is going to be surrounded by distractions like social media. It’s also a good choice for collaborative working, and means you don’t have to upload work to a separate cloud storage service. Google Docs (opens in new tab) is the most obvious choice, and has the advantage of saving your work automatically so you don’t have to worry if your connection fails. Here we’re looking at the very best word processors that can be used offline (particularly useful for distraction-free writing), but there are also several excellent browser-based tools to consider if you'd rather do your writing online. However, while there are some good, free word processing programs out there, they tend to not have so many features as paid-for software.Įven when they do, there can be compatibility issues with moving document formats between software platforms, especially when importing to Microsoft Word (opens in new tab).

You might be able to manage without a spreadsheet tool or something for making slideshows, but text documents are unavoidable.

Apache openoffice writer