Microsoft Quietly Releases Free Office — With Unremovable Ads and Lots of Limitations

Microsoft has quietly released a free version of the Office suite for Windows, which lets you create and edit documents in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint without a Microsoft 365 subscription or a license key. However, this version of Office has a number of drawbacks: many features are locked, there are ads, and you can only save files to OneDrive.

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The free version of Office is only available for Windows computers. However, Microsoft has not officially announced it. However, the idea of ​​integrating advertising into Office is not new – the software giant last considered such an opportunity back in 2009. Now it has been implemented.

In practice, working with the free version of Office resembles interacting with the web version of the application, but not without differences. For example, when working with Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, the user will be continuously shown an advertising banner placed on the right side of the workspace. It cannot be removed until a paid subscription is purchased. In addition, every few hours, 15-second advertising videos without sound are played in Office applications.

Another disadvantage is that the free version of Office does not allow you to save documents locally. However, the user can install the OneDrive application on their PC or use the web version of the cloud service to move local files there. Free OneDrive users get 5 GB of cloud storage space.

It should also be noted that many additional functions of Microsoft office applications are simply not available in the free version. Users will not be able to install plugins, add watermarks, use data analysis tools, etc. In Word, for example, page formatting is limited, WordArt, tables, and many other functions are not available. The situation is similar in Excel and PowerPoint, and the full list can be found here. In fact, the ad-supported version of Microsoft 365 only allows you to create or view, slightly edit, and save files.

Since Microsoft has not yet released a free ad-supported version of Office to the general public, it can be assumed that the product is currently in the testing phase with a limited number of users. It is not yet known when the official announcement might take place.