WPS Office, the popular freemium alternative Office suite, is now available on the Mac. The release of WPS Office 2020 — which was unveiled at the global launch event in New Delhi on Wednesday — fills a glaring gap in the portfolio of Kingsoft Office, the makers of WPS Office. The event also underlined company’s key focus on the Indian market, a country that was described at the event as Kingsoft’s “core market after China”.
“Given India’s massive workforce and diverse culture, it has proven to be an important market for us, Vincent Bian, Country Manager Kingsoft Office, India. “There is a huge demand for high-quality and effective tools in the market. However, research has shown alarming levels of pirated software being used here, including office software suites. Our aim is to end this era of piracy with a highly efficient and affordable suite that caters to multiple user segments. We will continue to invest in the market to achieve this goal.”
Kingsoft representatives revealed that WPS Office has over 23 million monthly active users (MAUs) in India. Globally, the company claims over 310 MAUs. The WPS Office app for Android has over 100 million installs during its lifetime, and an average rating of 4.4 stars on Google Play Store.
Hands on with WPS Office 2020 for Mac
As for the Mac version of WPS Office 2020, the app is an all-in-one Office suite, which means there are no separate apps for your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files — instead there’s a single app to open all those file types, as well as PDFs. Documents open in different tabs, which is a nice way of grouping related documents of different types. You can open a new window — called Workspace — to differentiate between different projects, for example.
If you’ve been using a Mac for any length of time, you’ll quickly notice that it looks and feels like a cross-platform app. With WPS Office available on so many platforms — macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android — it makes sense to share codebase, so this is one of the results of that approach. With that said, WPS Office is free to use — a $29.99 (approximately Rs. 2,150) annual subscription unlocks all features — so you can’t expect to have the polish of a product like Microsoft Office. With that said, the app does include Dark Mode support, so that is a welcome touch.
On the Mac, WPS Office suite will also compete with Apple’s own suite of office apps, namely Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. If your work involves working largely on the Mac and/ or iOS, it probably doesn’t make sense to bother with something like WPS Office. However, if you also work on Windows/ Android/ Linux devices, WPS Office 2020’s cross-platform sync feature can save a lot of time and effort.
We tried opening a bunch of large Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that we had lying around, and WPS Office 2020 for Mac opened them without any problems or formatting issues. The new version also ships with a bunch of templates to help you get started quickly.
WPS Office 2020 also makes it easy to OCR scanned documents, edit PDFs, covert them to Word files, and sign them, though some features might require you to sign up for a premium account, which is currently discounted to $19.49 (approximately Rs. 1,400) for an annual subscription as part of the back to school sale.