Open Microsoft Office Files on Windows

Here is how you can Open Microsoft Office Files on Windows without Microsoft Office

Microsoft is the ultimate king of productivity software. From Windows, the world’s most popular PC operating system which is everywhere from homes to offices, to the Office suite of applications, Microsoft has created some amazing productivity software and continues to improve on them with constant updates. Now, it has even come up with smartphone applications that allow you to take your documents on the go.

Thanks to their immense popularity, MS Office suite of applications, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, have become industry standards, promoting document formats like docx, xlsx, pptx, and many more. However, while this may be a blessing if you own the Office suite, it can also be a curse if you don’t have access to a PC with an active Office subscription. It is a costly product and not everyone has the cash to buy one.

Fortunately, there are many other free alternatives that allow you to open documents created by MS Office products. Here, we are listing down a few products that you can use,

How to Open a File in another Software?

To open a MS document in another software, you can perform the following steps,

  1. Install the alternative Software on your machine (from the list provided below)
  2. Right-click on the document you want to open and click on Open with.
  3. From the list of software, select the software you want to open it with.

Alternatively, you can also open the software and use the Open menu to navigate to the file you want to open. You can also set another program as default to open the Office files using our guide.

Microsoft Office Alternatives on Windows

Google Docs, Sheets & Slides

You can use Google’s amazing set of productivity tools for opening MS Word files using Google Docs, Excel files using Google Sheets, and PowerPoint files using Slides. While Google’s tools are primarily online, they also provide an offline option.

Download Google Docs, Sheets & Slides for Windows

OpenOffice

Apache OpenOffice is an open-source office productivity software suite that has multiple tools that allow you to open and edit Office files.

Download OpenOffice for Windows

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a free and open-source office suite, a project of The Document Foundation. It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, which was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice.

Download LibreOffice