An office software suite is a necessity on most PCs. You generally get a word processor, spreadsheet, business graphics creator, database, and drawing/illustration package. The best-known office suite is of course from Microsoft, but it's very expensive and can be difficult to use. Recent versions are also very much tied into the cloud in the expectation that you want to store all your documents in your OneDrive account. Which you may not particularly want to do.

For many years, Libre Office has been a competitor to Microsoft. It may not be quite as well known, but the individual programs are top-notch. And best of all, it's completely free. It's even open source, if you want to study the code.

The latest version of Libre Office is 5.1.1 and it's actually available as a portable version. So you can download it and use it on your PC very quickly and easily. When you run the installer, it creates a folder on your desktop. Open that folder and you'll find neat shortcuts to all the component applications, ready to use.

If you like Libre Office, just carry on using it. There's nothing else to do, and no licence fee to pay. But if you decide it's not for you, just delete the folder from your desktop and everything's gone. Unlike Microsoft Office, your registry won't be filled with remnants of the software, and all hard disk space used by the program will be freed up.

You can even copy the folder from your desktop to an external drive or USB stick, and run it from there if you want. Read More