WPS Office 2019: A Great Modern Alternative to LibreOffice

«WPS Office» has always been a solid opponent of «LibreOffice» on «Sistemas Operativos Linux» when managing the formats of «MS Office». In addition to being a free and functional software package of «Aplicaciones Ofimáticas» that manage to improve productivity in projects with a low budget.

Thus, «WPS Office» is a modern software package, although proprietary and closed, whose «Aplicaciones Ofimáticas» includes innovative and practical programs for the many common work formats, such as text, spreadsheets and presentation sheets, without having a respective «Visor de PDF». Its name comes from the acronyms of the names, in English, of its applications that make it up, that is, «WPS = Writer, Presentation y Spreadsheets».

It is worth mentioning that «WPS Office» is a widely used productivity suite that is also cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Android and iOS), that is, it is for computers and mobile devices. It currently registers +/- 1.200 million installations.

«WPS Office» it can be considered as a high-performance solution, despite its affordability, and at the recognizable height of others such as Microsoft Office, with which it is very compatible and comparable. «Writer, Presentation y Spreadsheets» are just as robust as «Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel y Word».

The office suite «WPS Office» is produced by «WPS Office Software» which is a subsidiary of «Kingsoft Corporation», which is a leading software and Internet services company in China, established in 1989, but currently has Offices in the US, China and Hong Kong, has more than 900 employees and owns 6 R&D Centers. D.

Furthermore, «Kingsoft Corporation» is a leading global developer of office software solutions, developing productivity applications for the consumer and business markets. It currently has more than 1 billion registered users around the world.

All about WPS Office

Websites

«WPS Office» currently has a official site in spanish which has multilingual support. It also has a very useful official community in english, from where you can download the installation files, the interfaces (mui) and the multilingual dictionaries (dicts)ües, fonts (fonts), some tools (tools) and licenses. At present, «WPS Office» goes for his «versión 11.2.0.8893» for Windows and «versión 11.1.0.8722» for Linux.

Despite not being an official site, the website of «Arch Linux» has an excellent Section on WPS. from which you can also download the installation files, interfaces (mui) and multiling dictionaries (dicts)ües, and some extensions created there available.

News, Features and Functions

New Arrivals

Among many others, there are the following:

• Added PDF component to support opening PDF documents (Kingsoft PDF Reader)
• Added support for installing and running on Centos7.
• Fixed various access problems to the cloud document account.
• Fixed a bug with WPS tags, which would flicker, get lost, or get stuck.
• Optimization of the process of installation, opening and printing of documents.
• Fixed a bug with entering characters in the input box of the internal browser.
• Added support for page margin adjustments when printing.
• Added support for print attribute configuration memory.
• Fixed the problem with WPS custom skin when opening and closing the application.
• Fixed border issue in some dialog boxes.
• Added character width adjustment function.
• Added support for reading ink objects.
• Added support for importing text files in formats like csv / prn / txt.
• Fixed error when saving a shared OOXML workbook.
• Fixed bug in the edition of shared workbooks on shared servers.
• Added support to support converting presentations to video format.
• Added voice recording function, enable content recording during a presentation.

Among the most outstanding, it is found that now said Office Suite no longer supports 32-bit versions.

General

• Compatible with DEBIAN, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Mint, Knoppix and many others.
• Fully compatible with Microsoft Office.
• It has a Spell Checker available in more than 10 different languages.
• Support from a large community of open source users.

Writer

• Fully compatible with Microsoft Office (.DOC and .DOCX).
• Allows the insertion of photos, graphics, and charts in documents.
• Accepts rich text, plus page and paragraph formatting features.
• Add track changes and comments.
• Executes the opening of multiple documents using tabs.
• Includes a paragraph adjustment tool to easily change the page format.

Presentation

• Fully compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX).
• It allows the insertion of photos, videos, personalized animation and more.
• Accepts the creation of graphs, charts and tables.
• Execute the opening of multiple presentations using tabs.

Spreadsheets

• Fully compatible with Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX).
• Supports functions for finance, statistics, IT, engineering, and more.
• It allows the insertion of photos, graphs, charts and tables.
• Includes an auto-fit of cells to their contents.
• Includes hundreds of common functions and formulas.

Installation and configuration

Downloading, installing and configuring «WPS Office» (in Spanish) too easy. Basically the installer file is downloaded from the download section of the official community site in English, and later la interface in Spanish (es_ES.7z) and the Spanish dictionary (es_ES.zip), from section ArchLinux website AUR. Then the WPS Office Suite using the executable with the command «dpkg» and unzip the interface and dictionary files in their respective folders which are:

• Path Interface (MUI):

/opt/kingsoft/wps-office/office6/mui/

• Dictionary Path (Dicts):

/opt/kingsoft/wps-office/office6/dicts/spellcheck/

It only remains to restart and test the operation and configuration in Spanish of it.

Note : The files for the Spanish interface (mui.7z) and the Spanish dictionary (dicts.7z) can also be obtained, for now, at the following link . For easier download and configuration.

File download

Running the application

Interface Validation in Spanish

Spanish Dictionary Check

Checking the installed version

Last but not least, it's worth highlighting that WPS Office also provides several online PDF tools that don't require any software downloads for converting documents to PDF or vice versa. These PDF tools offer a completely free solution to your PDF file problems.

Disadvantages

• It is a proprietary and closed software package, although very modern and functional.
  
• It does not support the LibreOffice Open Document Format or Standard (ODP / ODF).
• Does not integrate multilingual supportüIt is for languages ​​other than Chinese and English. Support must be incorporated manually by copying files to paths protected by a normal user, on Linux.
• The integration with MS Office Documents is very good but it needs to be polished to improve it.
• The integration with the cloud, that is, being able to log in online is very useful, but work must be done to improve it to ensure connectivity and synchronization with used mail services such as Google.
• They do not have official support in Spanish and other languages.
• It usually consumes around 200 MB of RAM at startup, so on older and / or low-resource computers it can be a bit heavy to use.

Conclusion

As you can see «WPS Office» is an excellent and complete proprietary office suite, which comes with a free version and a paid version, and with good support, in English and Chinese, by a wide community of users and with excellent online content for socialization and massification of it. In case you choose to use it, we recommend that you periodically be aware of what is shared by your community or your Blog.

Ultimately, «WPS Office» it's just an excellent «alternativa privativa» a «LibreOffice», for those who like installable programs on «Linux», that they comply or not, with the philosophy of «Software Libre», but that effectively and efficiently meet your needs.

That is, while «LibreOffice» is the best «Suite Ofimática» de «Software Libre» about «Linux», «WPS Office» represents only an excellent «alternativa privativa» about «Linux», among some others, such as «FreeOffice», regarding the management of office automation files «MS Office» refers.  «WPS Office» It is not to replace partially or completely «LibreOffice» but to complement it in the work tasks with the files of «MS Office».