Microsoft Office may be the absolute king in millions of offices around the world, but it's not hard to find a suitable replacement. The open source universe offers solutions like LibreOffice and OpenOffice; Google and Zoho have an office suite a couple of clicks away; and Microsoft itself enables a free line to its product. But if none of that interests you, you can download a copy of Essential Office, which includes compatibility with Word and Excel 97-2021, a diagram designer, and a PDF reader.
Many companies and organizations insist on distributing public documents using formats like docx or xlsx. On one hand, that gives us the advantage of escaping (at least temporarily) the editing of PDF files, and on the other… we must look for some solution compatible with Microsoft Office. LibreOffice and OpenOffice do a good job, but there are other options on the Web that are just as lightweight, or even more. One of them is Essential Office, and as its name suggests, it focuses on everything Word and Excel.
Essential Office: A Microsoft Office clone in less than 200 MB
The complete installation of Essential Office in its latest version does not exceed 170 megabytes, which makes it a fairly lightweight option for many machines. Unlike what we see in traditional Office, Essential Office does not offer separate executables for its tools. They are all available under the same interface, in a menu located on the left side of the screen: we have a word processor, spreadsheet, diagram designer, PDF reader, and calendar.
The interface of the applications does not have a Spanish translation, and the built-in dictionary only covers English, but it is possible to add others manually, as long as they use .dic and .aff formats. In fact, I think that is the biggest weakness of Essential Office. Other features I would like to see in the future are actions to hide the quick access toolbar by default, and for dark mode to be independent of the operating system (the latest update of Essential Office incorporates dark mode, but I haven't managed to disable it in the spreadsheet).
Apart from that, Essential Office works much better than we expected. Fortunately, the developer seems to have returned to this software after almost two years of pause, and it is likely we'll see more updates in the short term. Essential Office is free, offline, and donationware. Its download is available on the official website and in the Microsoft Store.
Official site and downloads: Click here
