The Office suite has become a staple in the digital world. Just as people say “send me a WhatsApp” instead of “a message” or “I’ll listen to it on Spotify” instead of mentioning another streaming platform, it’s common to hear “I’ll make a Word,” an Excel, or a PowerPoint rather than simply referring to a document, a spreadsheet, or a presentation.
Currently, the Office suite is only available through a Microsoft 365 subscription, whose plans have increased in price with the addition of Copilot AI. The only way to use Office for free is through its web version, which requires logging in with a Microsoft account.
Although this online version lacks many of the advanced features found in the subscription-based edition, it is still sufficient for most users. However, a new free alternative recently emerged—though it won’t be available for long.
This is a free ad-supported version of Office, which can be used locally but comes with a major limitation. According to Beebom, Microsoft released this ad-supported version as an experiment and clarified that it has no plans to permanently offer a free version of Office with ads.
In addition to displaying a banner ad on the right side of the screen, this version has a crucial restriction: documents created in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint cannot be saved locally. Instead, they can only be stored in OneDrive.
This move appears to be aimed at encouraging users to purchase more cloud storage, as Microsoft only provides 5 GB for free. To get more capacity, users must either pay for additional storage or subscribe to the premium version, which includes 1 TB of cloud space.
However, the requirement to store files in OneDrive is not necessarily a dealbreaker, as users can download their documents to a PC once they are created, allowing them to share or store them permanently while freeing up space in the cloud.
