Microsoft has updated their license for Office 2013.

"Based on customer feedback we have changed the Office 2013 retail license agreement to allow customers to transfer the software from one computer to another. This means customers can transfer Office 2013 to a different computer if their device fails or they get a new one. Previously, customers could only transfer their Office 2013 software to a new device if their PC failed under warranty.

While the license agreement accompanying Office 2013 software will be updated in a future release, this change is effective immediately and applies to Office Home and Student 2013, Office Home and Business 2013, Office Professional 2013 and the standalone Office 2013 applications. These transferability options are equivalent to those found in the Office 2010 retail license terms."

The problem with Microsoft Office is you often only need one or two programs and instead are forced to buy an entire suite of programs. Luckily for you, there are free alternatives available and yes, they are fully compatible , a question I am often asked.

Full Office Suites:

LibreOffice Productivity Suite 4.0.1
LibreOffice was developed to be a productivity suite that is compatible with other major office suites, and available on a variety of platforms. It is free software and therefore free to download, use and distribute.

SSuite Office - Premium HD 2.4
The world's first free HD optimized office software. This office suite runs on the Windows 2000 / XP / Vista / 7 / 8 platforms only.

Apache OpenOffice.org For Windows 3.41
OpenOffice.org is a free, Open Source alternative to MS Office with a Word compatible word processor, a complete Excel compatible spread sheet program and a Power Point like presentation software and drawing program and also allows to save to PDF file.

Kingsoft Office Suite Free 2012 8.1.0.3375
Kingsoft Office Suite Free 2012 is an free office suite that offers a number of features for creating, viewing and editing personal and business documents. Our Office Suite 2012 includes Writer, Presentation and spreadsheets.

OxygenOffice Professional 3.2.1
OxygenOffice Professional (formely know as OpenOffice.org Premium) is a free and open source enhancement of official OpenOffice.org plus some Extras for you to use. The Hungarian Native Language Team has modified the source of OpenOffice.org and bundled lot of extras with it.


Microsoft Word replacements:

SSuite Office - WordGraph 8.10
WordGraph is a free and very useful alternative to Microsoft Word, OpenOffice's Writer, or anything else out there claiming to be the latest and greatest. You don't even have a need for .NET or even JAVA to be installed.

AbiWord 2.9.4
AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft Word. It is suitable for typing papers, letters, reports, memos, etc.