If you"re not a fan of paying for software, you may be familiar with WPS Office, a free alternative to Microsoft"s Office suite, which has been available for some time now. WPS made its debut on the Microsoft Store last year, and now Kingsoft, the company behind the apps, has released the 2019 edition on Microsoft"s platform, as spotted by Windows Blog Italia.
WPS Office 2019 introduces a number of improvements to the experience, starting with the interface. The suite now offers a tab-based UI, which can group your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in a single window. This is done automatically to help you keep your work together, but you can also create different workspaces, and this lets you separate documents that may be related to different topics or projects.
Another change to the UI is the customizability. If you like customizing the look of your apps, WPS now offers skins to do exactly that. There don"t seem to be that many options as of right now, but there"s already some variety, and more skins are likely to show up later on. You can also choose a custom background color or image, though there isn"t a ton of flexibility around other elements of the UI.
Additionally, the start page now shows you your recent documents right off the bat, which should make it easier to pick up where you left off.
Lastly, Kingsoft also improved PDF file handling, adding support for commenting with notes, highlights, and more. The company also offers the usual suite of tools for converting PDF files into either Word documents or images.
As usual, WPS Office 2019 can be downloaded for free, but you may have to deal with some ads and limitations. A Premium subscription, which costs $29.99 per year, gets you 20GB of cloud storage (instead of 1GB), removes ads, and unlocks some additional features.