WPS Office: Good Free Microsoft Office Alternative for Linux Users

WPS Office a.k.a Kingsoft Office is a very good free Microsoft Office alternative for Linux users including Ubuntu. It has familiar ribbon-style user interface just like Microsoft Office 2007 has, it also has an ability to switch between ribbon-style interface to classic interface like LibreOffice does.

WPS Office comes with three main office applications those are Writer for word processor, Spreadsheet for Microsoft Excel alternative, and Presentation for Microsoft PowerPoint alternative. Those three applications are equipped with main features you most used in Microsoft Office and LibreOffice. WPS Office Writer can open .docx file properly without losing document format, it can also open spreadsheet and presentation created with Microsoft Office perfectly! Another great features of WPS Office for Linux is its ability to open many documents in one windows, the files are opened in tabs, so there is no need to open many windows for many documents.

The main disadvantages (according to me) is lack of ODT file support. You can not open ODT in WPS Office, so you have to save to DOC or DOCX format in LibreOffice if you want to open it in WPS office. Although you can open DOCX file properly, WPS Office doesn't offer many format to save as in Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, currently it supports *.wps, *.wpt (template), *.doc, *.dot (template), and *.txt. I hope the future version will support more format :)

WPS Office for Linux is a part of Chinese government projects to provide national operating system for their people so that WPS Office for Linux uses Chinese language by default. As it is a government project to provide an alternative to Microsoft product, WPS Office for Linux will be popular in China.

How to Install WPS Office on Ubuntu
WPS Office for Linux is in its beta version but you can try it on Ubuntu by downloading the deb package provided here. Once downloaded, simply install it using package manager or just execute the following command:

• sudo dpkg -i wps-office_8.1.0.3724~b1p2_i386.deb

Although WPS Office for Linux uses Chinese language by default, you can switch it to English by executing the following command:

• cd /opt/kingsoft/wps-office/office6/2052
• sudo rm qt.qm wps.qm wpp.qm et.qm

Open WPS Office again and it should display in English.

Regards :)