Since I don’t have any of the Microsoft Office suite – or Office 365 – installed, searching for “microsoft word” reveals that there just aren’t many options on this computer: Let’s have a closer look! First off, here’s my test Word document, my latest column for the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper: Better yet, you can download and use it on your Windows computer for free, and you’ll be delighted how well it works. Written by a substantial group of programmers whose goal was to duplicate Microsoft Office but in a free and cross-platform manner, it’s continued to grow for years and is now a remarkably powerful and capable suite of programs. Here’s a good video from to learn more: Get started with Google Docs.īut there’s a much more interesting alternative available too, a free software option called Open Office. One that I like is Google Docs, which offers an online-only, browser-based solution that can read Word documents and save your edits back as an MS Word doc, ready to share with your sister or anyone else. (This, of course, is no different to any other company’s approach to maximizing per customer revenue, so it’s not a criticism of Microsoft as much as an observation of how the industry has changed)įortunately, there are some really interesting alternatives out there if you need to have interoperability with Microsoft Office documents but don’t want to buy Microsoft Office or subscribe to Office 365 on your computer.

They’re cunning, those Microsoft folk, so most Windows computers come with a free 30 day, 90 day or even six month subscription to Office 365, which just gets you hooked into the system and makes it just about impossible to quit once the free period ends.

At $9.99 / month or $69.99 / year, however, you get to slowly pay an unbounded amount of money instead of the few hundred dollars to buy the software outright back in the day.

By creating a de facto industry standard for word processing, Microsoft has made a whole lot of money through Microsoft Word, and then the latest iteration, Microsoft Office 365, which is now a subscription service.

Open and edit word documents for free