Will we ever see a free version of Office on Linux?

There is no doubt that the maximum exponent in the office automation sector at the moment is Microsoft’s proposal, Office. This suite is made up of several very important programs in the software sector, such as Word , Excel or PowerPoint.

Many of you are fully aware, due to your own experience, that these applications are enormously widespread in both professional and personal fields. They are able to offer us a wide range of office automation solutions, whether to edit texts, create spreadsheets, manage email, design presentations , etc. In addition, it is a suite that has not stopped growing and evolving over the years in order to become what it is at the moment.

At the same time, we must bear in mind that this is a software solution developed by the same company as the most widely used PC operating system. We refer to Windows, a system belonging to the giant Microsoft. Both this and the suite that we are commenting on belong to the same developer, which is why the firm tries to unite both elements whenever possible. With this, what we want to tell you is that those from Redmond are committed to the use of Office in their different versions of Windows .

In addition to this operating system, we can also use the office suite on a computer based on macOS Apple But at this point, many of you may be wondering if one day there will be a version available for the open source system, Linux .

There is a web version of Office that we can use on Linux

The first thing to keep in mind here is that those who claim that we cannot use Microsoft’s office suite on a Linux distribution are wrong. It is true that we cannot download and install any of the latest versions released by the firm. users can use Windows . However, we can use a version of Office on any Linux distro .

web ms office 2021

Specifically, we are referring to the free online version of the suite . Despite being much more limited than the rest of the Office editions , this online version covers the basic needs of many users. To be able to use it, we only need a web browser installed on the operating system to be able to access its website. As you can imagine, this makes it equally accessible from the open source systems that we discussed.

There are other open source suites more than established

On the other hand, we will also tell you that the software giant may not be interested in developing a specific version of Office for Linux . This is because over the years regular users of this operating system have already looked for other more than acceptable alternative solutions.

In fact, there are some very interesting free proposals, in addition to being open source, that can perfectly stand up to Microsoft’s. A clear example of all this can be found with LibreOffice , one of the favorite proposals of this type for regular Linux users. For all these reasons, it is quite likely that Microsoft, at this point, has no intention of wasting money and effort on a new compatible version of Office.

1 Comment

  1. There can be formatting issues with open source when working with Word and Excel. Cross platform open source Only Office seems to be the best for avoiding problems from what I have experienced.

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