Earlier this week, Microsoft broke from a long tradition of only offering paid versions of the native Microsoft Office app (web having been free for some time) and silently introduced a free, ad-supported version of Microsoft Office exclusively for Windows 11 users. This was first spotted by Beebom, which tested it on Windows 11 machines and VMs (My testing on Windows 10 quickly revealed it to be business as usual on older versions of Windows. Go figure.)
Even so, it's nifty and arguably even intelligent of Microsoft to build in a "Skip for now" button leading into a free version of Microsoft Office allowing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to be used for free. The ads that support this use come in the form of the combination of a persistent ad banner onscreen, as well as a muted 15-second video ad playing every few hours.
However, there are still lots of caveats to your use of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint here. The greatest immediate caveat is that you can't save files locally and must instead save them to OneDrive, which means you don't have any support to edit local files. It's 2025, Microsoft — LibreOffice and Google Docs have existed way too long for you to be inconveniencing your free users like this.
A number of other problems also exist, though, greatly limiting the formatting and decorative options available to Microsoft's free users. Beebom painstakingly listed over 30 missing features in its original coverage. So, while I complimented Microsoft's prudence in having a free tier of its local Office applications available...there are some real glaring issues with the omissions here.
Even locking in just on Microsoft Word, the removal of key formatting options like line spacing, text wrapping, headers, footers, bookmarks, and even proper date & time fields is truly egregious. You can't even hyphenate anymore! While Beebom observes that the applications are still able to be used, their phrasing here is "most of the basic and some of the key features are available", but that honestly might be an understatement.
Because let's be very realistic about this. If you are willing to go through the trouble of using a free version of Microsoft Office instead of any number of truly-free alternatives that have been widely available to you for the past decade or more, you're doing it because maintaining compatibility with existing workflows and spaces reliant on Office is your priority. But with so many key formatting options locked behind a paywall, you really might as well not be using Microsoft Office at all at this point, and instead be hedging your bets with exporting files from LibreOffice or Google Drive.
If Microsoft is already insistent on monetizing its free users via advertisements, the least they could do is provide a usable version of Microsoft Office in exchange. The extensive list of cut features doesn't make Microsoft look any less stingy to the users of Windows 11, which already has plenty of ads.
