Microsoft is not offering a free download of Microsoft Word, or any other Office application like Excel or PowerPoint. The closes to using Word for free is to use Office Starter which offers Word and Excel free of charge. But there is a drawback to this: Office Starter is not available for download. It is distributed by select OEMs on PCs and notebooks. If you purchase a PC and find it installed you can use Word and Excel for free, if not you cannot.

Wordpad

But what are the alternatives? Windows itself comes with Wordpad, a free software capable of reading and editing Word text documents. Wordpad supports both old Office document formats such as doc but also the XML based Office document formats such as docx.

Microsoft Word Viewer

Word Viewer can only display Word documents. It basically is Word without the editing functionality. Users can view and print documents but that’s basically it. Unless there is some obscure file format that is supported by Word Viewer and not by Wordpad, your best bet is probably Wordpad, considering that it is already installed on most Windows systems.

Office Trials

Here is an interesting alternative, as it offers a time-limited free version of Office. Microsoft is offering trials of Office on their website. Users can download those trial versions and install them on their computer systems. The trials are time-limited, which means that they will stop working eventually, unless the user decides to buy the document suite.

Interested users can download trial versions of all Office 2010 editions directly from the Microsoft website. All editions include Microsoft Word and Excel at the least. It may not work forever but this is probably the closest to a free Microsoft Word download you can get. The third party tool Office Trial Extender can be used to extend the trial period of Office for up to five times.

Docs.com

The Internet offers several interesting options for users who need document editing functionality. It may not be for everyone, especially in cases where Internet connections are not available or unreliable, but most users can use free accounts to edit their Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents online.

Docs.com is the official Microsoft platform on the Internet. They have partnered up with Facebook to offer users options to work with Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents online. It is possible to create new documents, upload existing files and share them with friends and colleagues.

Open Office

When it comes to Microsoft Office alternatives, Open Office is usually the software suite that most users will think off. Open Office basically offers a free Open Source alternative to Microsoft Office. It offers a similar functionality, and comes with Word, Excel and PowerPoint replacements that can read, save and edit the document formats of Office 2010.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a free service by Google, that offers document management capabilities on the web. It basically allows Google account owners to upload documents from their computer to store, work and share them online. The service supports all Microsoft Office formats

Zoho Docs

Zoho Docs is another online document management service. It offers free basic access with one Gigabyte storage for users who want to edit their documents online.

To get back to the original question of this article: There is no such thing as a free download of Microsoft Word or any other Microsoft Office component for that matter. There are however valid alternatives available both online and offline that most computer users can use instead of Microsoft Office.

Microsoft released a compatibility patch for older Office versions which adds the functionality to those products but those who rely on Open Office for instance are facing a huge problem. Because, at the moment, Open Office does not support the docx format at all. If you open it you will only see lots of unreadable garbage.

Users have a few possibilities though. They can use the updated Word Viewer from the Microsoft website and use it to open the docx document. This document can then be copied and pasted into Open Office.

Another possibility would be to use the free online service called docx converter which converts docx documents into doc format readable by Open Office.

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