Free Software Collection
Free Office Software
Microsoft Office is now sold mainly as Microsoft 365, a yearly subscription; stop paying and the documents remain but editing goes away. Most people need far less: open a docx someone sent, change a few lines, save it back in the same format; build a spreadsheet; fix a slide deck; read a PDF and pull out a few pages. This list is matched to those jobs — two full office suites for Word, Excel and PowerPoint work, PDF readers and page tools for the Acrobat work, draw.io for the Visio work, and Pandoc and Typst for writing and typesetting. Format compatibility is the biggest worry when switching, and the FAQ below takes it on directly.
9 curated recommendations
Selection Criteria
- Opens, edits and saves docx, xlsx, pptx or PDF — not view-only.
- No subscription, and no page, file-count or export limits on the free version.
- Works offline on the desktop with files kept locally and no forced cloud sign-in.
- Open source, with no ads and no bundled installers.
Recommended Tools
LibreOffice
A complete office suite, Office-compatible, free forever
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors
A free office suite with outstanding format compatibility
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
draw.io
Flowcharts and architecture diagrams — no account, no diagram limits
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
Sumatra PDF
An ultra-lightweight PDF reader for Windows
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
Okular
The universal document viewer from KDE
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
PDFsam Basic
Split and merge PDFs without uploading them to a website
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
Stirling-PDF
A self-hosted all-in-one PDF toolbox
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- No Sign-up
Pandoc
The universal translator between document formats
- Open Source
- No Ads
- No Tracking
- Offline
Typst
A typesetting system ten times easier than LaTeX, compiling in milliseconds
- Open Source
- No Ads
- Offline
- No Sign-up
FAQ
- LibreOffice or ONLYOFFICE?
- If you trade files with Microsoft Office users all the time, ONLYOFFICE. Its docx, xlsx and pptx fidelity is among the best of the open-source suites, complex spreadsheets and slides rarely shift on opening, and the tabbed interface is close to Office. If you want the broader set of apps, LibreOffice — beyond documents, spreadsheets and slides it has drawing, formulas and a database, six apps in all. Both are free and can be installed side by side.
- Will a docx someone sent me break in free software?
- Simple documents are fine — text, headings, ordinary tables and images display correctly. Trouble comes from finely tuned styles, floating text-and-image layouts, complex tables, and fonts the sender has but you do not. For an important file, open it once in ONLYOFFICE to compare, then decide whether to ask for a PDF instead.
- What replaces Acrobat?
- For reading on Windows, SumatraPDF: it starts fast, uses little memory and can run as a single portable file. Cross-platform, or for highlights, annotations and form filling, Okular. For merging, splitting, extracting and rotating pages, PDFsam Basic, entirely on your machine. For OCR, compression, conversion and signing, deploy Stirling-PDF with Docker — more than 50 tools running on your own hardware.
- Where do Pandoc and Typst fit in an Office replacement?
- They replace writing long documents in Word. Pandoc converts between formats: write in Markdown, turn it into a docx with one command, apply a Word template and generate the bibliography automatically. Typst is a typesetting system for papers, reports and CVs, showing each edit immediately, with formulas and cross-references built in. Both mean typing markup rather than clicking menus.