Earlier, someone wrote, "... Yet another ego-tripping offering from Giovanni (#11) ... It’s all very well to show off your knowledge of all things free every day but how about actually reviewing the actual giveaway ... That’s what the page is all about ... How about a thought for the developer each day rather than throw up a list of opposition software complete with multi8ple LOL’s and !!!!!’s ..."

I LOVE Giovanni's reviews and competitive offerings, and they are the among the MOST VALUABLE information the developers of today's give away can take advantage of -- because they apparently don't know about the alternatives if Giovanni can find better.

If the developers try everything Giovanni suggests, ten the next offering from those developers should be superlative.

Until then, until any developer understand the competition, and learns how to make their product at least as capable and functional, then they hardly stand a chance of making their product stand out!

Giovanni, Ohio, joeyspop, Peter Elliot, fredward, and so many others are offering a path for the creation of outstanding products ... if the developers will only listen and get in touch with the real world Giovanni and others offer them, and that Giovanni and others offer to all of us.

Thank you, Giovanni.

And thanks to everyone else who freely contributes their time and energy to give ANY feedback here -- including Chas!

It would not run on Win 2000. Some kind of error involving kernel32.

I would have liked to try this offer, but to be honest when I installed the suite from the last Kingsoft give-away it produced many problems by conflicting with other software.

For example, MSN behaved strangely with punctuation keys being remapped.... and in QuickEdit which I use for coding, some HTML could not be entered properly because the square brackets would not display, likewise JAVA, Ruby and C were almost impossible to code.

I can also attest to the comment of @54 who found that the language options changed (depending on which software was being used (for example, quote ["] became the British pound-sterling character).

After having had enough of this, I uninstalled Kingsoft Office (including Word). Even using "Your Uninstaller" software, the Kingsoft suite could not be fully eradicated. Hence I continued to have the language selection changing from US English, to UK English, to Canadian French. Truly a nightmare.

Eventually, I had to reinstall Windows and finally got rid of the problem. So as you can imagine, I really don't find any compelling reason to install this giveaway.

Architecture:
Acer Aspire M5811
Intel Core i5
6 GB RAM
Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Not downloading this.
Have been happy user of Microsoft Word for a long time.
Many other softwares support WinWord.

I already have the entire suite and it is a newer version. For FREE! What gives here? BTW - can't connect to giveawayoftheday.com to register product anyway. Guess I'll bypass this one.

Am a professional writer upgrading from XP to Win7 & need to either upgrade Word97 to a new version (I'd rather run bamboo splinters under my nails than upgrade Word), or find a substitute. Have to be able to read/write DOCX, but my main requirements are something easy on my eyes (I use it 8 hr/day),with lots & lots of custom keyboard shortcuts (& macros if possible) & I want it glitch-free & fast -- and if I mistype some key combo when I'm going flatout I don't want to have to spend an hour trying to undo whatever mess I got myself into, or lose even 5 minutes' worth of work (you can see why Word & I have . . . words.)

Found Kingstoft & gave it a good test-drive a few weeks ago: it's fully servicable, but nothing stands out. I didn't care for its physical interface (personal preference, but as I said, I'm using the thing for hours every day & that's important to me; might not be to you). Had problems setting up manuscript pages (something glitchy with the margins; never did figure out what, maybe it was just my computer). Just a lot of small things I didn't care for that added up to my not liking it enough to buy it (nor will I bother downloading the freebie today).

I also tested -- and am buying -- Atlantis, which runs rings around anything else I've tried (and in the last month I've probably tried every WP out there, free & not). I know people here hate it when you talk about programs other than the offered one, but if I can help just one person find a program that works, I'll take the flack.

My bottom line: word processors are very personal things & you won't know if something works for you until you try it. I wouldn't (and didn't) pay for Kingsoft, but as a freebie, it would probably do fine for anyone with basic WP needs. I recommend giving it a try because it just might be the perfect WP for YOU.

Great program, and it installed like a breeze. Thanks so much, GAOTD and Kingsoft!

The best MS Office work-alike is not free, but it is well worth the money. And that is Ashampoo Office 2012.

It is fast and compact, and it can easily become "portable" if you want.

Ashampoo Office is actually a cheaper, rebranded version of Softmaker Office.

Version comparison:

Ashampoo Office:
Textmaker, Planmaker (spreadsheet), Presentation Maker--all fully compatible with Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Softmaker Office standard:
Adds a utility for writing macros in Visual Basic.

Softmaker Office professional:
Adds a superfluous Email client.

@53 FredWaterstone
Quote: "If MS Office, Open Office, Libre Office etc. are too big for you"

You also can use WordPad or Notepad

Yet another ego-tripping offering from Giovanni (#11).
It's all very well to show off your knowledge of all things free every day but how about actually reviewing the actual giveaway.
That's what the page is all about.
How about a thought for the developer each day rather than throw up a list of opposition software complete with multi8ple LOL's and !!!!!'s

@13 krak, please check out the alert given to Kingsoft Office Free on the website:

http://www.freewarebb.com/topic/60776-kingsoft-office-suite-free-not-freeware/

After 1 year your documents are locked up and you have to buy the key to unlock them. The freeware label is a sham. I had the "freeware" version. It is one the better office suites/writers out there. After reading the post, I uninstalled the program. All the documents created with it were locked (luckily, there weren't many!). I am hesitant to endorse this product after that experience due to the company's shady practice.

Calls home WAAAAY too much for my tastes. For a GOTD program that offers neither tech support or updates, I see little reason for it to call home so much. I installed it on a VM test machine where the FW is set to prompt all. All I did was click allow--or not. Never really got around to testing it--spent too much time farting with the FW catching every connection attempt. Even when "allow" was clicked, it just kept asking for an OK on yet another connection attempt.

Installed perfectly on Win7 64bit. Played around with it for awhile and found it pretty much the same as Microsoft Office. Perfect for the work I do

Download Hungup after Downloading 40.5 MB out of the 47.6 MB attempts to restart download not possible... Download page not starting the download!!

Thanks GOTD and Kingsoft! I have been looking for this type of software.

I have been using the Kingsoft suite for a while. As a replacement for MS Office I can recommend it. Only office suite on my work laptop. Haven't had compatibility issues, yet. Used OpenOffice previously. This is much more user friendly than OO and to me that is most important.

I have tried Kingston's Office from giveaway - but was disappointed a bit because it was constantly resetting Regional Options to En/Us from those which I use (OS - Windows XP SP3). I hope, this one does not have this "useful" feature?

Old wisdom:
Copying is much cheaper than inventing. Would you buy a Mona Lisa copy for half the original's price?

If MS Office, Open Office, Libre Office etc. are too big for you, use AbiWord or other small programs, best portable versions, as it seems to be nearly impossible to uninstall Kingsoft perfectly.

this is the first time I have heard of this product so I was curious. installation went smoothly giving me the choice of selection 'classic' or '2012' themes. I have chosen '2012' and was surprised to see a very similar interface to MS-Word (Office2010). for someone such as myself with no familiarity to today's giveaway, but is acquainted with Office usage was very easy.
Kingsoft saves the created files in a 'doc' format and indeed the file size created with Kingsoft was much smaller than the same file format (doc)created by MS-Word, however, when saving the same file in the newer MS-Word format (docx) which is available in Office 2007 and Office 2010, the docx format is the smaller of the two, and the bigger the file the bigger the difference. (if the text is 3 pages and more, you will notice the difference in file size right away).

When using more than one language in the same text, MS-Word has a huge advantage as Kingsoft stumble in times and totally a mess, when trying both left to right as well as right to left languages in the same sentence (a thing that is very easy to achieve in MS-Word).
I was surprised that the Asian language support was not as smooth, (after all the vendor is Chinese) as I have accepted. I believe they should aim for better performances in that area.

all in all Kingsoft Writer functions well, (thumbs up) and is a good alternative to MS-Word. if you do not have Office 2007 or 2010, than this can be very useful, if you do have Office, then probably you do not need this one.

tested on 7 Pro x64

Imagine my surprise when installing Kingsoft Writer today and watching it UNinstall the recent offering of Kingsoft Office Suite Professional that included Kingsoft Writer, Kingsoft Spreadsheets and Kingsoft Presentation.

It certainly "offers a smaller file size".

P.S. Thank you nonetheless...

@43 Corky,
Raja @42's statement "Less impact on system performance" relates to the program's impact on speed of operation and consumption of memory. It does not necessarily refer to the amount of disk space it occupies. That's something different.

Would love to try it, but I own Microsoft Office 2007 Pro Extended and I don't need a program that might possibly conflict with Office 2007. Thanks anyways.

I started off biased on installing this product already. Someone that has "decking out" on the program summary, for something supposed to be professional, doesn't build confidence. Upon reading reviews, I decided to not install the product.

I used the free version of this software for sometime before the professional version was given away for free on this site and I upgraded. I am delighted with how well this software performs considering its price comparison with Microsoft Office. If you haven't already got the previous giveaway and aren't currently using the free version, I would highly recommend you to download and install this software!

I beleive most people on GOTD are like me with limited computer skills.
Only #5 states a specific purpose this software can do (create ebooks).
People who can point out specific activities they can do with this product would bode better for newbies like myself to make an informed decision as to whether this (or any GOTD) software would be worth downloading.

Zonealarm has now warned me 9 (nine) times since installation and opening and closing the program that it needs access to the internet. Why so much permission?

I have the Kingsoft Office Suite Free 2012 (8.1.0.3032) on my computer.
It does everything Microsoft Office can do.

I don't need the Standard editions few additional functions.
I also have Apache OpenOffice 3.4 which is similar.

We are spoilt for choise these days with lovely freeware.

A small footprint is not enough of a feature to have me download this, even for free. Disk space is cheap and I have plenty. I don't care how big a program is. It must do something unique, wonderful, amazing, and something I really want to make me switch. Sorry.

Less impact on system performance.Really a good alternative to microsoft office.Thanks for every one who involves in this giveaway.

#24 Read - not write....

Overall, Kingsoft makes a quite usable Office product, and is an excellent, less resource hungry, MS Office alternative. They are serious developers, and have an Android platform offering as well.

But, if you are just going to try this out, I strongly suggest that you use an installation manager package to monitor the installation.

As I mentioned in yesterday's comment regarding Full Uninstaller (where by complete coincidence I happened to use Kingsoft Office as an example), Kingsoft writes many critical registry entries (right-click context menu, file associations, system classes & library pointers) and its built-in uninstall routine does not remove a very large number of them when you uninstall Kingsoft, resulting in an unstable system. A good installation manager will log all of these install-time modifications, and roll them back.

However, I also haven't found an uninstaller that fully uninstalls Kingsoft Office properly (after extended use), becuase Kingsoft Office appears to make other additions and changes to the registry during normal operation.

Since the testing was done with Office Pro 8.1 components (in part and as a whole), I would presume that this caveat applies to Writer Standard 8.0 as well.

So installing Kingsoft Office (in part or in whole) should be considered a one-way street to a permanent install (unless you love reinstalling Windows).

I might be the only one who reads the "I have read and understand. . . " text.

Having done so, I am confused. The license for this product seems to be shareware, 30 day. Is this a bug in the display license? Or will this self-destruct on about July 13?

I installed the previous giveaway of Kingsoft Office. After struggling with Writer for about an hour, I uninstalled it. It was glitchy, stubborn, rendered oddly (big,big) on my system, and worst of all the font sizes were limited - who ever heard of such a thing? And, when I went into the font properties box to try setting the font and size from there, it didn't keep the settings. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give this a ZERO.

I have a version of Kingsoft Office that works well for transferring documents from my cell phone to the computer. Since I don't see an option for cell phone on this giveaway, I guess I'll stick with the version I have. It has sure been a lifesaver for me since I've been hospitalized and bedridden so much lately.

In the author's website contains a price of $ 49.95 and here is offered at $ 29.95? Version of ashampoo worth $ 59.99 and is similar or better.

@ 30 Jeff, Excuse me but it definately has issues, eg. it can't read docx with form controls well. (Form controls are bundled under Developer tab)

Here's more on that: http://www.addictivetips.com/microsoft-office/create-user-entry-forms-in-word-2010/

Then again if you don't use those nifty features... But to claim it's equal (highly compatible even) to MS word; that's too much praise...

There are some good alternatives summed up at comment # 11, you might want to check them out.

Cons:

- The EULA TOS says 30-day trial.

- It definitely deletes prior versions of the entire suite, even though they claim that it can work side by side with prior versions -- is their their way of taking back their previous full suite freebie? (from their own readme.tx file, "... Is it necessary to uninstall a previous version before installing Kingsoft Office 2012?
Answer: Kingsoft Office 2012 will not conflict with an older version. You can preserve the older version while installing a new one. ...")

- It installs into an "Office 6" directory even though they label it version 8, and I definitely saw "standard" not "Pro", and the executable file itself has an internal date of November 20, 2011 = OLD, and this agrees with the copyright statement under [ Help ] that, by the way, gives credit to a variety of open source programmers!

Pros:

- I like that it's search and replace includes ^p and ^l and other non-text characters, as Microsoft word does -- I've yet to see Open Office and others do the same.

- It appears to imitate the familiar Microsoft menus.

- I have not tried, but it promises to open *.docx files. (It does not offer to save as *.docx, but seriously, who cares?)

- It exports directly to PDF.

Conclusion:

KingSoft appears to lie and misrepresent their offering (mixed versions, deleting previously installed software without warning or control against their own promise), so perhaps they are just like Microsoft after all!

;-)

Thanks to everyone for offering your experience and especially your suggestions for alternatives.

I got the Kingsoft offer last time, and was delighted with it.
So not going to download this one. Its dealt with everything
I needed it to. If you don't have this,.... give it a shot.
Thanks Kingsoft and GAOD!!!

@ 25. Debbie
..Yes, it reads DOCX files without an issue, and furthermore has the ability to read previous MS version formats. In the above "Key Features" it mentions, "Highly compatible with Microsoft Word (97/2000/2003/2007/2010)"

I am going to download and install this standalone version to use beside Ashampoo Office 2010, simply because I've read good comments above about today's offer. Textmaker 2010 is a part of Ashampoo office suite, though i find Kingsoft's word-processor to be somewhat superior.

Many Thanks Kingsoft and GAOTD

One great thing about this wp is that the interface is similiar to Word, and that means there's no learning curve involved. And it's very compatible with Word for importing and exporting files between both programs. There is a huge array of features and templates for a small program. But I do wish there was an option to add a fancy border. I do decorated ebooks, so this would come in handy.

The only problem I had was when trying to access the help files. when I clicked on both the question mark and Kingsoft Writer Help my zip program appeared. I clicked on the 'extract' button and it appeared to go through the motions, but the next time I clicked on the help buttons, the same thing happened. When I clicked on F1, a help file for my HP printer popped up.

I appreciate the opportunity to try this nifty little program. Thanks!

I had Kingsoft Office Suite installed on my computer at one time (from a previous GOTD); however, between MS Works (preinstalled on my computer) and OpenOffice (which I have since replaced with LibreOffice, on the recommendation of some "Linux geek" acquaintances), all the functions of Kingsoft Office Suite appear to be duplicated. I can see where someone whose computer just came with MS Office Starter Edition, who just wants a full-featured word processor, would like Kingsoft Writer Standard; however, for everyone else (unless one has a specific reason why you HAVE to use MS Office), just download LibreOffice instead.

Well, thanks for the down-vote...But should tell ya
I compare Kingsoft Writer to the crappy MS Office Starter.

At least no annoying flashing ads to distract from working.

All thumbs up Kingsoft
and thanks again
great software

now you can down-vote as much as like

I downloaded the suite offered a while ago and I am very pleased with it but for those who missed it you should get this it works better than the ms one in my opinion.

I downloaded the Kingsoft suite when it was offered earlier. I was excited. However it was unable to open either Open Office documents or Microsoft Word documents older than '97. Hence, I could not use it to access my files done in Word 6. I'm not a technical person, so I don't know how else to explain this. But when I opened a document in MS Word format, which had been modified by Open Office Writer, modified and saved it with Kingsoft, the format would have been changed and it would take me hours to fix it when I re-opened it with Open Office Writer.

I found Kingsoft to be much less flexible than Open Office Writer. I have used Microsoft Office extensively. But for the last several years I have used Open Office almost exclusively. For me, the only real advantage of Kingsoft's word processor was that it is quite agile, opening quickly and being very easy to use.

Does it read and write .DOCX
That is VERY important
Please advise!

Downloaded an installed without any problems, but... they are NOT giving away Kingsoft Writer Standard 2012 (8.0.3022)as promised. They give you Kingsoft Writer (8.1.0.3019). See details her: http://i50.tinypic.com/2hxr879.jpg

Thanks for the offer, and Kingsoft Office Free is great too!

To be honest, I'm going for the free suite instead.
I might upgrade the Word part, but so far no need to.

Thanks Again, Kingsoft

I use Libre office system here because
1. Cost
2. Works on linux and windows
3. No more constant changing of interface
4. Everything that was dependent on Microsoft office has now found an equal or template in libre office at somewhat great effort to myself


Kingsoft Writer Standard 2012.
Tested on XP SP3 and Win 7 64bit

Nothing I can break on it yet.
It did fail to find my email client. Voyager.

To all "portable" fans who want to let registry left untouched:

Libre Office portable remains my favorite, as Open Office portable no longer seems to be updated.
AbiWord has a portable issue too!

And you can install as much versions side by side as you like.

GUys, the version 2012 paid is just like MS Office and better in my opinion, suites with Zebre desktop what else do you need. Great giveaway and I use it on my Android, and tablets syncs up with my Box.net account!