Kingsoft Office Suite 2012 is a free alternative to MS Office. Kingsoft Office Suite 2012 Free is a piece of free software that contains the three most commonly used Office applications; a writing product, a presentation creator, and a spreadsheet creator. If you’re familiar with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you will be able to make use of most of the features of Kingsoft Office Suite 2012.
Kingsoft Writer
The main interface of Kingsoft Writer is very similar to the interface of Microsoft Word. Text styles are easier to access, being on a drop down menu similar to font and font size. Most of the same features that you’re familiar with in Word are available in Kingsoft Writer. Tables, formulas, inserting graphics and hyperlinks; it’s all available in Writer. My biggest problems with the program are that there doesn’t appear to be a way to adjust line spacing, page margin adjustment is only available through the ruler feature, and, worst of all for someone like me, there is no live word count feature; you have to hit a series of keys for the program to count the number of words you’ve typed. The program also doesn’t alert you to grammar errors. Its spell check function doesn’t like contractions.
Kingsoft Presentation
I’ve been using PowerPoint to create automated slideshows for years. So, I thought that using Kingsoft Presentation was going to be easy. Create a number of slides as a slideshow, add a little music to it and viola! Instant automatically running slideshow. The problem is, that didn’t happen. I spent over 30 minutes playing with the program and looking through the help files, but I wasn’t able to find any information on how to create a self-running presentation or slideshow. All of the options were there as in PowerPoint, but none of the various slideshows I made ran by themself after opening them. They opened directly into PowerPoint. In order to view the presentations I had created as a full screen slideshow, I had to start the slideshow from within Kingsoft Presentation or PowerPoint.
Kingsoft Spreadsheet
Kingsoft Spreadsheet is the Excel-like portion of the Kingsoft Office Suite 2012. All of the features and functions you’re familiar with in Excel are available in Kingsoft presentation. You’re just not going to find them as easily or in the same places that you’re used to with Excel.
If you’ve got a few hours to dedicate to relearning how to use the programs you’re familiar with, Kingsoft Office Suite 2012 is an excellent full-featured and free choice. If you don’t have a few hours to dedicate and already know exactly how to do everything you need to do with an office suite, stick with Microsoft Office. You’ll spend a little more money, but you’ll save a large amount of time. The one main thing I liked about each of these three applications is that they launch quite a bit faster than the Microsoft versions.
