WPS Office 2020

About this release

WPS Office is the suite people install when they need to open, edit and hand back documents that were written somewhere else, without paying for the suite those documents came from. Writer handles text documents, Spreadsheets handles workbooks, and Presentation handles slide decks, and all three read and write the current formats directly rather than importing into a house format and exporting back out again. Formatting, tables, styles, embedded charts and tracked changes survive the round trip, which is the only thing that actually matters when a file is going back to somebody who will notice.

The interface will look immediately familiar to anyone who has used a ribbon based office suite, and that is deliberate. Tabs run across the top, the panels sit where you expect them, and the keyboard shortcuts match the ones your hands already know. The one genuine addition is the tabbed document model, where several open files share a single window the way browser tabs do, which is a small thing that turns out to matter a lot once you have nine documents open at the same time.

The whole package is small. The installer is a fraction of the size of the suites it competes with, it starts fast on old hardware, and it runs perfectly well on a machine with four gigabytes of memory. There is a built in PDF module that converts documents in both directions, a template library covering the usual reports, invoices and decks, and cloud connectors that you can ignore entirely if you want it to stay a local application. For a secondary machine, a laptop, or a workshop computer that just needs to print a quote, it is usually more than enough.

What it does

• Writer, Spreadsheets and Presentation covering documents, workbooks and slide decks
• Native reading and writing of the mainstream office formats with formatting preserved
• Tabbed document interface so multiple files share one window
• Built in PDF module for exporting documents and converting PDFs back to editable text
• Full formula library in Spreadsheets including lookup, statistical and financial functions
• Pivot tables, conditional formatting and chart types matching the common suites
• Track changes, comments and document comparison for review workflows
• Template library covering reports, invoices, resumes, budgets and decks
• Paragraph and character styles, section breaks, headers, footers and references
• Runs comfortably on older hardware with a small install footprint

Changes in this version

• Improved fidelity on documents containing complex nested tables
• Faster startup on mechanical drives after the first launch
• Reworked PDF export with better font subsetting
• Additional chart types added to the spreadsheet module
• Fixed a crash when pasting large ranges between open workbooks

What the package contains

• WPS Office 2020 full offline installer
• Writer, Spreadsheets and Presentation modules
• PDF module with conversion in both directions
• Template library and the full font set the templates depend on
• Readme with the install order written out step by step

Installation notes

Follow these in order. Most reports of a failed install come from skipping a step rather than from the package itself.

1. Close any other office suite that is currently running.
2. Disconnect from the network before you start.
3. Extract the archive to any folder, the package is small enough that path length is not an issue.
4. Run the installer as administrator and accept the default component selection.
5. Do not launch it yet, apply the included activation step first.
6. Open Writer once, close it, then reconnect to the network.

System requirements

Things worth knowing

• Turn off the automatic update check so a later update does not undo the state the package was prepared in.
• File associations are claimed during install, uncheck them in the setup options if you want another suite to keep them.
• The cloud and advertising panels can be switched off entirely in the settings, it works fine as a purely local application.

Questions about this title

What people are saying

Listing information

This entry is catalogued under Office & Productivity and carries the tags below. Language coverage is Multilingual, 14 interface languages, and the supported platform list is Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 11. Version 11.2.0.9629 is the current catalogued build, last checked 5 days ago, and the entry has been in the index since it was added 3 years ago.