WPS Office on Linux, free Microsoft Office alternative

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crosscourt
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WPS Office on Linux, free Microsoft Office alternative

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tlmiller
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Re: WPS Office on Linux, free Microsoft Office alternative

Post by tlmiller »

Good timing for them to review it since WPS had just released a new version earlier this month.

Sadly, it's still not exactly an amazing office suite. Interface still looks very similar to the modern version of O365, which is a positive if you're coming from MS. Still does weird things in writer like reversing font/background colors. Formatting of MS openxml documents still not perfect, and still in what testing I had done when it was released was inferior to FreeOffice, and probably inferior even to LibreOffice 6.2. Speed it is better than LibreOffice, but no better than FreeOffice.

Overall, a decent alternative if your most important feature is that it looks and acts like MS Office. Otherwise, better can be had for the same price.
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Re: WPS Office on Linux, free Microsoft Office alternative

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Totally agree as FreeOffice for me has been the best choice but if they could get their act together, I could see WPS becoming popular.
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Re: WPS Office on Linux, free Microsoft Office alternative

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So, found another negative for WPS Office. At least on Debian, with WPS installed xlsx files are recognized as .zip files, and so open with whatever your archiver is. If you set them to open with an office application, then .zip files will attempt to open with the office app. Uninstall WPS, and everything works correctly.

I think I'm going to stop even bothering testing WPS at this point.
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Re: WPS Office on Linux, free Microsoft Office alternative

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I kept hoping things might improve but havent used it for quite awhile.
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Re: WPS Office on Linux, free Microsoft Office alternative

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I've generally always kept it installed on one of my machines. Recently it was on the 3379, but right now I've removed it. Too irritating that I was working on some spreadsheets yesterday and it was causing no end of issues. I'm sure at some point I'll try it again simply because I have so many machines available for testing. But it will be at least next version. This version just has TOO MANY issues.
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Re: WPS Office on Linux, free Microsoft Office alternative

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Hoping they eventually get it right.
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Re: WPS Office on Linux, free Microsoft Office alternative

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The funny thing is, if you go back to 2012 or so, Kingsoft Office (the precursor to WPS) WAS the best linux office suite!! FreeOffice at the time lacked a LOT of features (although it did already have pretty decent compatibility with MS), SoftMaker of course worked well and had the features that FreeOffice lacked, but it was, and is, not free as in beer like most and so will turn some away (this is the first version of SoftMaker Office I purchased). OpenOffice worked well in a silo, but had HORRIBLE compatibility with MS. LibreOffice at the time was very new, and was mostly still identical to OpenOffice, and was no better at compatibility, either. And most of the others that were available back then I've forgotten about.
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Re: WPS Office on Linux, free Microsoft Office alternative

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Makes you wonder what happened.
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Re: WPS Office on Linux, free Microsoft Office alternative

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It does at that.
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