Apache OpenOffice Writer: Best for long and complex documents. Image: Apache. If you hate Microsoft Word because of its ribbon, then Apache’s OpenOffice Writer is the 2003 throwback you want.

Microsoft Word is perhaps the world's most popular word-processing program, and has been a staple in homes, schools, and offices for decades. Muhammed Selim Korkutata/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images ...

Google Docs - the online staple for word processing that is up there with Microsoft Word in terms of capabilities; plus, it's all online, works well on mobile, and you get 15GB of free storage.

The company’s Google Docs solution (or to be specific, the integrated word processor) is cross-platform and interoperable, automatically syncs, is easily shareable, and perhaps best of all, is free.

Change is on the horizon for Word. But it’s not because we don’t need word processing software anymore. Digital documents exist at the foundation of daily work for about 1.2 billion people.