If you’re in the modern world, you need modern tools—but so many of them are so expensive. Microsoft Office is the industry-standard for making documents, spreadsheets, and powerpoints; but the price tag can be painful. But your work needs to look professional, you have to be able to open files from that program for your job, and often other programs won’t convert right. Are you doomed to hand your money and business over to Microsoft year after year?
Not necessarily.
WPS Office is coming in as the underdog in the fight—a program that claims to do all the same as Microsoft office, for a much lower (or even free!) price. So, let’s see how it stands up to the standards and hype in this WPS Office review!
What is WPS Office?
WPS Office is basically a replacement for Microsoft Office. It looks similar to Microsoft’s Office, it performs similar to Microsoft’s Office, it is organized similar to Microsoft’s Office—but it comes at a much cheaper price.
Created by Chinese software development company Kingsoft, it is a “complete office suite with a pdf editor.” It is compatible with Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Adobe PDF, and almost any kind of file. Because of WPS Office’s small download size, it is easy to run on any computer—and they have apps that allow you to access it from any device.
How Does WPS Office Work?
WPS Office is divided into three main parts—WPS Writer, WPS Presentation, and WPS Spreadsheet. (Paid plans have an additional section, WPS PDF.) You can download WPS Office for free, or purchase yearly subscriptions.
WPS Writer is simple. It looks and operates much like a Microsoft Word document, so it is intuitive to find all of the settings you need. It has a simple and minimalistic style, which allows you to focus on the content you’re typing, rather than getting lost in buttons. All the settings are within a ribbon navigation up top, so you can toggle between design, layouts, or spell checkers.
You can also add other things into WPS Writer. This word processor allows you to add images, custom charts, and tables to your documents (without completely messing up the formatting of your document!) It also allows you a wide range of color variation for highlights, and for charts.
WPS Presentation is a slide editor, set up just how you would expect Power Point to be. You have a multitude of templates to pick from to help jump-start your progress—all of which are color customizable. You can adjust the font styles and colors within a slide, and even insert multimedia files within your slides. Videos, images, and audio files—you can use all of them to help make your presentation pop.
WPS Spreadsheets works just how you would expect Excel or Google Sheets to—with formulas, a million lines available to you, and easy adjustment to line spacing and height.
One of WPS Office’s great strength is its ability to multitask. WPS Office allows you to have several windows open within one screen at one time—so you don’t need to jump back and forth between tabs. Goodbye data-transferring whiplash—and the amount of eye fatigue that can bring!
While it may not be a dedicated collaboration app such as Nozbe or Notion, WPS Office does allow you to collaborate in real-time with others through document sharing. This is also great because WPS Office is available on all your devices—Mac, Windows, Android, or iOS. You can start a document or project on one device, edit and adjust it on another device, and share it on a third! If you’re using your mobile device, you can even share your Presentation over wi-fi, so you won’t have to worry about bringing the right wires or cables to your business meeting.
WPS Office also offers a PDF editor for Premium Members. With this program, you can edit pdfs easily, marking important points or adjusting spacing. You can merge two pdfs together, or turn it into a word document. You can even turn a picture into text (great for turning your pictures of the professor’s slides into notes), or repair damaged files.
Is WPS Office Free?
WPS Office is incredibly cheap—it’s either free, or less than $4 a month. The free plan of WPS Office has all it’s main features—Writer, Presentation, and Spreadsheets. However, it also has some advertisements, which can be annoying. But you have access to this free version, with 1 GB of data, for as long as you want.
You can also upgrade to the Premium version of WPS Office for some extra features. Premium costs $29.99 per year (which is about $3.99 per month). Premium allows you to get rid of the adds, as well as access to WPS PDF. This program allows you to convert PDFs into documents, edit PDFs, and merge or split them. It also gives you 20 GB of storage, as well as 9 connected devices. You also get some useful tools like “optimal character recognition” which converts images to word documents or PDFs.
Is WPS Office Safe?
While you might be hesitant and wonder if this is just a knock-off of Microsoft Office, there’s nothing to fear. WPS Office was established back in 1989, and there’s few reports of any safety concerns. You download the small file onto your own computer, and have your own personal cloud.
Conclusion: WPS Office
WPS Office is easy to use, intuitive, and cheap. It functions how Microsoft Office would, at a fraction of the price. It is compatible with a massive number of different files, and allows you to share live with others when you’re online, but also still do work on your own when offline. It’s incredibly well priced, bug-free, and allows you to work across multiple devices in multiple places. WPS Office is slim and cheaper cousin of Microsoft Office—and a good replacement for it.
