No need to look for dubious methods to recover popular Microsoft Office applications for free. There is indeed a completely legal way to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint without spending a cent.
Despite the years and profound developments in IT, Microsoft’s Office suite remains one of the most popular and most used products in the world. Its three flagship applications, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, remain essential tools in the professional sphere and can also provide many services in a personal setting.
But this software is not free and their cost can quickly prove prohibitive for simple or occasional use. To purchase an individual license, you need to count on nearly €150, which you will also have to pay for each new major version of the product. And for the subscription plan called Microsoft 365, it will cost around ten euros per month. However, there is a completely legal and surprisingly little-known way to use the famous Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications for free, but also other Microsoft Office products, like Forms or Lists.
Indeed, to respond to changes in usage and the rise in power of competing office applications such as Google Docs or OpenOffice, Microsoft has made online versions of certain software from its Office suite available free of charge. Thus, it is perfectly possible to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint in your favorite Internet browser without spending a euro.
To benefit from it, you simply need to have a Microsoft account, which can be created for free and quickly on a dedicated space on the Microsoft site and which most Windows users already have. To access the applications, simply go to the Office online page and log in using your Microsoft credentials. Once this is done, you then access a dashboard allowing you to launch and use the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications inside your web browser.
Online versions of software are very similar to their desktop counterparts. We find the well-known interface of the Office suite, with the ribbon bringing together the different tools available in the form of tabs, and you will therefore not be lost and will quickly find your bearings if you are used to working on the office versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Please note, however, that certain functions are not available in the online version of the applications: on Word, it is not possible to perform a mail merge or add a watermark to the document, Excel does not allow you to create personalized cell styles or add calculated fields in pivot tables, and PowerPoint does not offer as many transition effects as its classic version for example.
However, these restrictions only concern some of the most complex functions, and the range of tools available largely meets the vast majority of office automation needs, whether for writing elaborately formatted documents, analyzing large datasets or create sophisticated presentations. In addition, two lesser-known applications from the Office suite are also available for free, Forms and Lists, which, as their names indicate, allow you to create forms and interactive lists. Finally, note that to use these applications in your browser, your documents must be stored online on Microsoft’s OneDrive service, for which you have 5 GB of space in the free plan, which is more than enough to store a large number of office files.