Don’t pay for a subscription when full office suites are available for free.
Buying Microsoft Office used to be simple: you paid once for a license and could use that version as long as you wanted. But like a lot of software, a one-time purchase has turned into an endless subscription, as is the case with Microsoft 365.
Since Office 2013, Microsoft has pushed the subscription (originally called Office 365) as the main way to buy Office. You can still buy a standalone version (like Office Home 2024 for $180) for access to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but it only works on one computer and is pricey.
Microsoft 365's Family plan is a decent deal if you have enough people in your family (especially since they get 1TB of cloud storage each), but being pushed into a subscription for such a fundamental tool is frustrating. That's even more so after Microsoft crammed the plans full of AI features you may not want, then raised the price with no way to skip the AI tools.
Thankfully, there are free alternatives that offer a lot of what you need from Office without all the nonsense.
If you don't want to use a third-party alternative, Office Online is a Google Docs-like suite that's a suitable replacement for many people. By signing into your Microsoft account, you gain access to free web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, plus other tools like Forms, Teams and To Do.
These are stripped-down offerings that lack advanced features like macros and watermarks, but still offer core features like headings in Word, pivot tables in Excel and transitions in PowerPoint.
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