How to get free office applications for your PC
So, you’ve recycled an old PC, installed a free operating system on it or maybe it’s still running Windows, and the next step is to get hold of some office applications like a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation package.
Microsoft Office is an option, but it’s not free (the Home and Student edition currently costs £60) and it will run slowly on older computers. Fortunately there are alternatives which won’t cost you a penny and are better suited to less powerful hardware.
Google Apps
Google provides a free word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application, all of which run inside your web browser. Because the apps are browser-based, they don’t need much in the way of computing horsepower and this makes them ideal for anybody using an older PC. Another benefit is that it doesn’t matter what operating system your PC has, so long as you have a web browser.
Google Docs offer all of the features you would expect from modern office applications and should be capable of handling most of the kind of work that the majority of people will need to do.
By default, Google Docs saves all of your files online so that you can access them easily from any computer with web access simply by logging into your account. You can also save local copies of the document in a range of popular file formats, including those compatible with MS Office. Google Docs can also open most MS Office files.
The only real weak point of Google Docs is that it stops working if your internet connection ever goes offline.
OpenOffice
Open Office is a free alternative to MS Office and is one of the most popular free applications in the world. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation application, graphics editor and database. It’s fully compatible with MS Office and runs on Windows, Mac or Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu.
The current version (3.1) of Open Office is a powerful, fully featured application suite designed for relatively modern PCs, so you’ll need 512Mb of memory to run it at a reasonable speed. However, the website offers an archive of previous versions which can run on older computers – the first version of the software is able to run on an original Pentium processor with 64Mb of memory.
AbiWord
If all you need is a straightforward word processor and you don’t want to clog up your hard disk with unnecessary applications that you won’t use, then AbiWord is ideal. AbiWord is a popular free word processor that offers all of the features that most users will ever need and is fully compatible with the latest version of MS Word, so you won’t have any problems reading documents sent by other people.
The application has fairly low system requirements and should run comfortably on an original Pentium processor with 16MB of memory. It runs on any version of Windows from 95 onwards, and is also available for Mac OS X, Ubuntu or any other Linux based operating system.
