A free alternative to Microsoft Word

Word costs money every year, and for a great deal of what people write it is more program than the job needs. This page is the honest account of what you gain, what you give up, and how to move your files across.

What "free" actually means here

Officewrite has no paid tier, no trial period, no upsell and no account. It is a non-profit educational project, and the source is public for anyone to read or change. You can use it in your browser without installing anything, or download it for Windows and work entirely offline.

Nothing you write is uploaded. There is no server component, no telemetry and no sign-in, so your documents stay on the device you wrote them on.

Your files stay standard .docx

The usual worry about leaving Word is being locked out of your own documents. That does not apply, because DOCX is not a Microsoft secret — it is an open published standard, ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500, which any program is free to implement.

Officewrite reads .docx and saves back to .docx. A file you write here opens in Word, in LibreOffice, in Google Docs, or on a colleague's machine, with no conversion step and no export dance. It also handles .rtf, .html and .txt, and exports PDF.

What you give up

Worth being straight about, because most comparison pages are not. Moving off Word costs you:

• Mail merge — generating hundreds of letters from a spreadsheet.
• Macros and VBA — scripted automation inside documents.
• Deep Office integration — live links into Excel workbooks and Outlook.
• Real-time co-authoring — several people typing in one document at once.

If your work depends on any of those, keep Word; nothing here replaces them. For essays, letters, reports, CVs and notes — which is most writing — you will not miss them.

What you keep

The ribbon, and the shortcuts your hands already know. Styles and a styles gallery. Headings with a table of contents that keeps itself current. Tables, images with text wrapping, shapes and text boxes. Track changes with insertions and deletions, comments, and a reviewing pane. Footnotes, endnotes, captions, cross-references and citations in APA, MLA, Chicago or IEEE. Spell checking, word count and an accessibility checker.

How to move across

1. Open Officewrite in your browser, or install it on Windows.
2. Open your existing .docx file — no import or conversion needed.
3. Edit as normal, and save. The file stays .docx.

There is no migration to do and no library to move. Your documents remain ordinary files in ordinary folders.

See also: how to open a .docx file without Word · Officewrite compared with Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs