WPS Office (an

acronym An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...

for Writer, Presentation and Spreadsheets, previously known as Kingsoft Office) is an

office suite Productivity software (also called personal productivity software or office productivity software) is application software used for producing information (such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital paintings ...

for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, W ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whic ...

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

, Android, and

HarmonyOS HarmonyOS (HMOS) () is a distributed operating system developed by Huawei to collaborate and interconnect with multiple smart devices on the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. In its current multi-kernel design, the operating system selects s ...

developed by

Zhuhai Zhuhai (, ; Yale: ''Jyūhói''), also known as Chuhai is a prefecture-level city located on the west bank of Pearl River estuary on the central coast of southern Guangdong province, People's Republic of China, on the southeastern edge of Pear ...

-based Chinese software developer

Kingsoft Kingsoft Corporation () is a Chinese software company based in Beijing. Kingsoft operates four subsidiaries: Seasun for video game development, Cheetah Mobile for mobile internet apps, Kingsoft Cloud for cloud storage platforms, and WPS for of ...

. It also comes pre-installed on

Fire tablet The Amazon Fire, formerly called the Kindle Fire, is a line of tablet computers developed by Amazon. Built with Quanta Computer, the Kindle Fire was first released in November 2011, featuring a color 7-inch multi-touch display with IPS tech ...

s. WPS Office is made up of three primary components: WPS Writer, WPS Presentation, and WPS Spreadsheet. By 2022, WPS Office reached a number of more than 494 million monthly active users and over 1.2 billion installations. The personal basic version is free to use. A fully featured professional-grade version is also available for a subscription fee. WPS Office 2016 was released in 2016. As of 2019, the Linux version is developed and supported by a volunteer community rather than Kingsoft itself. The product has had a long history of development in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

under the name "WPS" and "WPS Office". For a time, Kingsoft branded the suite as "KSOffice" for the international market, but later returned to "WPS Office". Since the release of WPS Office 2005, the

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fr ...

is similar to that of

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a market ...

products, and it supports Microsoft document formats in addition to its own files.

History

Origins

WPS Office was initially known as Super-WPS文字处理系统 (Super-WPS Word Processing System, then known simply as WPS) in 1988 as a word processor that ran on

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicatio ...

systems and sold by then-

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...

Kingsun COMPUTER CO. LTD.. It was the first Chinese-language word processor designed and developed for the mainland Chinese market. WPS was used from the late 1980s.

Early history

Faced with competition from Microsoft Office, Kingsoft chief software architect Pak Kwan Kau (求伯君) diverted 4 million

Renminbi The renminbi (; symbol: ¥; ISO code: CNY; abbreviation: RMB) is the official currency of the People's Republic of China and one of the world's most traded currencies, ranking as the fifth most traded currency in the world as of April 2022. ...

from his personal account to assist in the development of WPS 97 for Microsoft Windows. In 1997, WPS 97 was released. The next version, WPS 2000, was released two years later. Both products were developed for a 16-bit Windows platform, with the capability of running on 32-bit Windows platforms. In May 2001, Kingsoft launched a full office suite under the name WPS Office 2001, which contained a word processor together with spreadsheet and presentation applications. With WPS Office 2001, Kingsoft entered the office productivity market in the People's Republic of China. In 2002, WPS Office 2002 was released, adding an email client to the office suite. WPS Office 2002 aimed to maintain interface compatibility with established office products. In 2003, WPS Office 2003 was released. The Chinese government made Kingsoft office software the standard for various divisions of the government. The 2004 incarnation of the office suite, dubbed ''WPS Office Storm'', was released in late 2004. It claimed to offer total

backward compatibility Backward compatibility (sometimes known as backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with input designed for such a system, especially in ...

with Microsoft Office file formats. Unlike previous versions, WPS Storm was based on OpenOffice.org and was the first WPS Office suite to support operating systems other than Microsoft Windows. Kingsoft collaborated with

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

and IBM to integrate its text-to-text and

text-to-speech Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

technology into WPS Office Storm. In late 2005, WPS Office 2005 was released with a revamped interface and a smaller file size. Besides the Professional edition, a free Simplified Chinese edition was offered for students and home users. A

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts ...

-hosted edition was provided for Linux users of WPS Office Storm. In 2007, Kingsoft Office 2007 was released. This was the first version that tried to enter international markets, with support for the English and Japanese languages. The native Chinese-language version continued under the name WPS Office. In 2009, Kingsoft Office 2009 was released. It had increased compatibility with Microsoft Office including support for the newer 2007-version file formats. In 2010, Kingsoft Office 2010 was released. In 2011, Kingsoft Office was granted funding from the Chinese government and received further orders from central ministries in China. Kingsoft Office Suite Free 2012 was released in 2011. Kingsoft Office Professional 2012 and Kingsoft Office Standard 2012 were released for sale in February 2012, in addition to Kingsoft Office for Android. The initial release for Android included standard word processor functions such as creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. On 28 March 2012 Kingsoft announced that WPS for Linux was under development. It is the third WPS Linux product, following WPS Storm and WPS 2005. It was developed from scratch, based on the Qt framework, as compatible as possible with its Windows counterpart. The free and paid versions of Kingsoft Office 2013 were released on 4 June 2013. They consist of three programs: Writer, Spreadsheets, and Presentation, which are similar to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. WPS Office for Linux Alpha 18 Patch 1 was released on 11 June 2015.

2014-present

On June 6, 2014, all Kingsoft Office products were renamed WPS Office. On December 16, 2014, WPS Office 2014 for Windows, build 9.1.0.4932, was released as a subscription model for a monthly charge of US$3 for some features. The free version provided basic features and supported Microsoft Office .doc, .xls, and .ppt file formats. Premium paid versions provided full compatibility for Microsoft Office files. Officially only the paid 2014 version supported saving files in .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx formats, but, actually, the free version also supported these formats (as had the 2013 free version). On June 21, 2016, WPS Office 2016 for Windows became generally available as

Freemium Freemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium," is a pricing strategy by which a basic product or service is provided free of charge, but money (a premium) is charged for additional features, services, or virtual (online) or physical ...

software, with no subscription needed for basic features. On 28 May 2017 Kingsoft

tweeted Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

that the Linux version was at a halt, but denied this a few days later, removed the tweet, and issued a further alpha version. Kingsoft also tweeted making reference to making WPS Office for Linux open-source towards the end of 2017 to allow the Linux community to step in and continue maintaining it, but later deleted this tweet too. Since at least June 2022, the fully functional Linux freeware version "WPS 2021" could simply be downloaded from the WPS website at no cost to the user. WPS Office 2019 was released on May 6, 2019. It introduced new integration and personalized features as well as full support for the

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems ...

format. On July 22, 2021, WPS Office arrived on Huawei's new

platform on smartphones and tablets with Multi-terminal document service capabilities as a .hap app. HarmonyOS version comes with large-screen presentation, small-screen prompts, text highlighting to focus on key information, full-screen video playback without professional settings, small-screen graffiti, large-screen presentation, picture zoom information at a glance, atomic service on-the-go. Also HarmonyOS version of WPS Office connects the personal version and multi-screen collaboration to improve productivity.

Editions

WPS Office has versions for multiple operating systems. It has editions for: *

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

(

Fedora A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both sides ...

CentOS CentOS (, from Community Enterprise Operating System; also known as CentOS Linux) is a Linux distribution that provides a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat En ...

OpenSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open source RPM-based Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0. Additionally the project creates a variety of tools, ...

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...

Mint MiNT is Now TOS (MiNT) is a free software alternative operating system kernel for the Atari ST system and its successors. It is a multi-tasking alternative to TOS and MagiC. Together with the free system components fVDI device drivers, XaAES ...

Knoppix KNOPPIX ( ) is an operating system based on Debian designed to be run directly from a CD / DVD (Live CD) or a USB flash drive (Live USB), one of the first live operating system distributions (just after Yggdrasil Linux). Knoppix was develope ...

) — Originally supports both 32- and 64-bit systems, however support for 32-bit systems stopped as of July 2019. * Android *

In addition to the above, WPS Office also has a web version.

Versions and subscription model

WPS Office 2016 is available in Free, Premium, and Professional versions, along with versions for Android and iOS. The free version provides basic features and supports Microsoft Office file formats. Some features, such as printing and mail-merge, can be temporarily accessed only after viewing an advertisement, which WPS Office refers to as sponsored access. The subscription-based, paid version, called WPS Office 2016 Premium, is available for US$9.99 per 3 months, and makes all features available without viewing advertisements. A lifetime license for WPS Office 2016 Professional can be purchased for $79.99.

File format

According to an April 2017 review of WPS Office 2016 Free v10.2.0.5871 for Windows, the program opens and saves all

document formats (doc, docx, xls, xlsx, etc.),

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript ...

, RTF, XML, and

. * Text document formats: wps, wpt, doc, dot, docx, dotx, docm, dotm * XML document formats: xml, htm, html, mht, mhtm, mhtml * Spreadsheet document formats: et, ett, xls, xlsx, xlt, xltx, csv, xlsm, xltm, xlsb, ets * Slideshow document formats: ppt, pot, pps, dps, dpt, pptx, potx, ppsx, pptm, potm, ppsm, dpss

Notes and references

External links

*
Windows Update History
{{Office suites 1988 software Android (operating system) software Chinese brands Computer-related introductions in 1988 IOS software Office suites Office suites for Linux Office suites for macOS Office suites for Windows Pascal (programming language) software Proprietary commercial software for Linux Proprietary software that uses Qt Software that uses Qt Windows word processors