CNET's Cheapskate scours the Web for great deals on PCs, phones, gadgets and much more. Questions about the Cheapskate blog? Find the answers on our., and with it the Microsoft adopted a couple years back: $69 per year for the single-user Personal Edition, $99 per year for the five-user Home Edition or $149.99 to buy the suite outright. Make no mistake, I like Office. Word, Excel and PowerPoint have been refined and polished to a fine shine, and Outlook is arguably the best desktop mail client currently available, especially for business users. Microsoft's free online version of Word is not too shabby. Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET But for years many of us have been spoiled by Google Docs, OpenOffice and other free alternatives, to the point where it just seems ludicrous to pay for Microsoft's suite -- even with its 1 terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage and (snicker) 60 minutes of monthly Skype time.

(Excuse my mockery, but this is such a paltry value-add, one few people ever use, yet Microsoft wants you to think it's all that and a bag of chips.) My question for you, fellow cheeps: What's your solution? My guess is you're not paying for Office either (unless you're getting it cheap or free as a student or from your company), but you still need word processing, spreadsheets and/or presentations. One of my longtime favorites, WPS Office (formerly Kingsoft Office), has become something of a mess. If you head to WPS.com, you find only Android, iOS and Linux versions of the suite.

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A little Googling reveals that Kingsoft proper still offers the Windows version, but good luck figuring out the. (My advice: click the Download button next to Office Suite Free 2013. That's the version I used for a long while and really liked.) What about Google Docs? It's effective enough for basic document work, but file management is kind of a pain -- especially if you use Google Drive as your portal. (If there's a way to sort your documents by file type, I haven't found it.) And like most of Google's Web-based apps, it's just ugly. I consider myself a creative guy, and when I'm creating stuff, I prefer a pretty interface. Which brings us to Microsoft Office Online, a surprisingly decent set of tools that more or less rival what Google has to offer -- but with a much prettier UI.

Free software falls into two categories: promotional freebies, usually hoped to serve form of commercial again, and software developed to help people fight back against big software providers. The latter has grown hugely as more people have embraced open source projects, where the building blocks – big chunks of code – are free for everybody to adapt and improve. WPS Office Free is a slimmed down version of a premium office suite, but you'd hardly know it. Each of its three programs looks just as slick as the latest versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.