There's a free Microsoft Office option for Windows now, but it comes with ads

Did you know that Microsoft quietly launched a free version of Office for Windows and didn't tell anyone? According to a new report today, that's true. There are, however, multiple huge caveats. First, this is apparently a "limited test", whatever that means, so the procedure outlined below may or may not give you access to the Office apps for free.

Second, you'll get a banner ad constantly, as well as a video ad every few hours. You also can't save files locally, only to OneDrive. And finally, you are very limited in what you can do with these free versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

But they do exist. The way to get them is download Office from the Microsoft website, then run the installer and let it download the whole suite of apps. When you then open any Office app, you'll get a pop-up asking you to sign in.

Click "Skip for now", then you'll see another pop-up saying "Welcome to free Word, Excel, and PowerPoint".

At this point you need to click "Continue for free" and then, on the next screen, click "Save to OneDrive".

That's it. You now hopefully have free Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Windows, but with severely limited feature sets - the full list of stuff you can't do with them is available at the Source linked below.

Source