A new version of WPS Office for Linux, a free (as in beer) productivity suite modelled after Microsoft Office, is now available to download.
WPS Office v11.1.0.8372 ships with a modest set of improvements and fixes, the majority of which are pulled from the recent Windows’ release of WPS Office 2019.
Notable picks from the change-log:
- New application skins
- Easier access to recently opened documents and templates
- Open new document in Tavs
- SVG + QR picture support
- Font size previews
- New navigation panel
- Font replacement feature
- Improved PDF export
Although this release touts a “built-in browser”, it’s not actually an embedded web-browser. Instead, as noted above, it’s a tabbed interface that lets you open multiple documents in the same window, i.e. like tabs in a web browser.
Not to be confused with other MS Office clones
The WPS Office suite (once known as Kingsoft Office) is often confused with FreeOffice, a similarly positioned Microsoft Office alternative that’s also available on Linux.
“Anyone familiar with Microsoft Office will feel right at home with WPS Office”
WPS Office
Both apps feature a UI design that’s very close to the one shipped in recent versions of Microsoft Office. This is intentional. WPS say: “…anyone familiar with Microsoft Office will feel right at home with WPS Office”.
Both WPS Office and FreeOffice also support Microsoft Office document formats, both opening, editing, and saving. It’s proficiency in this is, some say, better than that offered by LibreOffice. Your own milage my vary, of course.
Uniquely, WPS Office works on both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux systems, including Linux Mint and Ubuntu.
WPS Office for Linux is developed and supported by the WPS Community rather than the China-based ‘WPS’ company itself. Linux updates are generally infrequent.
Download WPS Office for Linux
You can download WPS Office for Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora and other Linux distributions from the official website:
Installers for Windows can be found on the main WPS website. There you’ll also find links to Android and iOS versions.
An online forum is available for feedback and assistance with Linux builds (should you need it) but I’m not going to link to it as it’s overrun with spam posts, and the only genuine posts I can see were made in 2013.