European alternatives to Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is the desktop word processor that made .docx the default way documents move between organisations. It runs locally and needs no network, and it carries the machinery a browser editor does not: full-fidelity Track Changes, mail merge, citations and bibliographies, styles inherited from .dotx templates, content controls, and VBA macros. A free web version exists at office.com; the desktop application is what a Microsoft 365 subscription actually buys.

Leaving is rarely about the words. Organisations run on Word templates with locked styles, on macros written years ago that nobody wants to rewrite, and on the assumption that an attachment opens identically at the other end. Legal and public-sector work depends on Track Changes and document comparison behaving exactly as Word behaves, because a redline is a negotiating record rather than a convenience.

So a replacement is judged on .docx round-trip fidelity before anything else. The European options below both read and write the format natively — one as a desktop suite, one as a self-hosted browser editor — and neither runs VBA.