Question from Danita.: I bought a used laptop from a friend a while back and it had Microsoft Office on it.
When I asked him if he had the installation disk he said he had downloaded it from a site that gives away programs for free.
The hard drive in the laptop stopped working a few days ago and I had to have it replaced.
Can you give me the link to the page where I can download MS Office for free? The link my friend gave me doesn’t work and he’s stopped answering my messages.
Thanks for your help.
Rick’s answer: I hate to be the bearer of bad news Danita, but I’m afraid the answer to your question is no.
There are indeed places on the Internet that let you download commercial software for free, but those copies are illegal and not worth the potential trouble if you were to get caught.
And my guess is the reason that link doesn’t work anymore is because the illegal download site got reported and shut down.
What’s more, most of the free “bootlegged” copies of commercial programs are infected with malware.
In short, I strongly recommend that you stay far away from any website that offers to allow you to download commercial software for free. The money saved simply doesn’t justify the risks in my opinion.
But now I have some good news: You can legally download a great Office suite that works a lot like Microsoft Office for free (and it reads and writes Office files just fine). It’s called LibreOffice, and I’ve used it for years.
There are actually several good (and free) Microsoft Office alternatives, but I prefer LibreOffice over the others because it always works well for me and it’s constantly being updated with bug fixes and security updates.
If you’d like to give it a try for yourself you can download LibreOffice right here for free.
I hope this helps, Danita. Good luck!
Bonus tip: LibreOffice isn’t the only free alternative to expensive commercial software. In fact, there are several of them.
What’s more, you can even replace Windows itself with a powerful and free operating system called Linux. Click here to read more about it.