WPS Office Free 2014 (formerly Kingsoft Office)

[Anupam]

Originally Posted by George.J

The previous download was an incomplete one.

Forgot to mention in my previous post about the download. I tried to download WPS Office twice with Free Download Manager, and both times, the download will just get stuck at 99%, and won't complete, even though it showed that the full size had been downloaded. I then had to download it with Firefox, which downloads as a single segment. Quite strange.

[George.J]

Originally Posted by Anupam

Forgot to mention in my previous post about the download. I tried to download WPS Office twice with Free Download Manager, and both times, the download will just get stuck at 99%, and won't complete, even though it showed that the full size had been downloaded. I then had to download it with Firefox, which downloads as a single segment. Quite strange.

Same for me too. Since I'm currently testing Internet Download Accelerator, I tried to download with it twice, it was incomplete, and reduced the number of threads to 1, and it finished fine.

Seems like the problem is in the server which doesn't support multi-threaded downloads.

[Anupam]

Originally Posted by George.J

Seems like the problem is in the server which doesn't support multi-threaded downloads.

If that's the case, then it should show this upfront, when starting the download. It downloads fine with multi-threads with a download manager, until the download size is complete, but does not complete the download fully. That's really frustrating.

In case resume support is not there, the download manager does show it, but no such thing was shown for this download.

[George.J]

Originally Posted by Anupam

I It downloads fine with multi-threads with a download manager, until the download size is complete, but does not complete the download fully. That's really frustrating.

In case resume support is not there, the download manager does show it, but no such thing was shown for this download.

Yeah when the download is nearly completed, it will try to merge the segments together to one file, that's where it fails.

[Anupam]

I had downloaded the latest version of WPS Office from their site, and it now comes with a trial of 30 days, after which it reverts to the free version.

However, after the trial version ended a day ago, I noticed in the information window that came up, features that will be available in premium version, and not free. Among these were the noticeable ones that files cannot be saved in docx, xslx, pptx format.

These restrictions were not there in the earlier free versions I guess.

This is what I had feared will happen ultimately... either the suite will go fully commercial, or restrict some important features in the free version.

I am thinking of going back to the last pure free version, but I deleted it from my software collection, unfortunately

[J_L]

It's still available here, so get it while you can: http://www.ksosoft.com/product/office-free.html

[Jojo Yee]

Just downloaded the latest version (9.1.04932) of WPS Office for Windows, free Home Basic Edition. Some full features as seen here are restricted to Home Premium and Business editions after a 30-day trial of the Basic Edition.

Also just downloaded the latest version of WPS Office for Linux. It carries a higher version number 9.1.04945 (though tagged as Alpha 16 Patch 3).

Good news for Linux users if it does not follow the route of the Windows version. Currently the Linux version has only one edition with full features available for free.

[Anupam]

Originally Posted by J_L

It's still available here, so get it while you can: http://www.ksosoft.com/product/office-free.html

Thanks J_L, but if you see the page, it is the office 2014 version. Only the title of the page, which appears in the browser tab says office 2013, but it is quite misleading.

Kingsoft Office 2013 however, can be downloaded from here:

http://www.kingsoftstore.com/writer-free.html

Although the page is for Writer only, and similar pages for Spreadsheets and Presentation are there, but the download offered on all three pages is for Office 2013.

Currently downloading that.

In this version, individual Writer, Spreadsheet, and Presentation can be installed separately, or selectively, during the installation, which is also an advantage.

It is quite a shame, however, how Kingsoft have taken away this important feature of saving files in docx, xlsx, or pptx formats from the free version.

[J_L]

Yes but it is an earlier version of Kingsoft Office 2014, the last one before the trial was introduced.

[Anupam]

Oh okay, I will download that one and check it out. Thanks.