UbitMenu
From Office 2007, Microsoft has introduced a new tabbed interface to its business suite applications. This is the Ribbon UI which continues to divide users between those who love it for its simplicity and those who hate it for the excessive size of its buttons. For those who are part of the latter school of thought it exists UbitMenu, a small free program that adds a tab called Menu to the Office 2007/2010 interface where the old ones are classic Office menus (translated into city). Download from here.
Appnimi Word Password Recovery
When you often work with Word documents, it is not difficult to find yourself dealing with password protected doc or docx files for which you do not know or have lost the password. Appnimi Word Password Recovery is a free program that allows you to find out the passwords of Word documents based on two types of attacks: the one called brute force which tries to find the password of the selected file character by character by trying various combinations and the dictionary which discovers passwords based on the meaningful words included in a dictionary file. Download from here.
Microsoft Mathematics per Word
Microsoft Office includes an excellent software to perform calculations and statistics called Excel, but sometimes it could be useful to have advanced mathematical features even in Word. Microsoft Mathematics per Word is a free add-on for Word (produced by Microsoft itself) that adds functions to draw graphs in 2 and 3 dimensions, calculate numerical results, solve equations or inequalities and simplify algebraic expressions to the most famous word processor in the world. It automatically activates in a new tab of the Ribbon interface named Mathematics. Download from here.
PocoDoc Lite
While not one of the largest files in the world, Word documents when they start piling up in large quantities can end up taking up a lot of space on your hard drive (or storage device where you keep them). PocoDoc Lite is a free program for Windows and Mac OS X that allows you to compress Word documents without locking them up in compressed archives and without compromising their quality. It uses a special algorithm that allows you to compress all Office files (including Office 2007/2010) and PDFs up to 20-30%. Unfortunately it does not allow you to process multiple files at the same time and requires an active Internet connection to work. Download from here.
Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack
With Office 2007, in addition to a new interface, Microsoft has also introduced a new type of file Open XML, the various docx, xlsx, etc. which have replaced the classic Office file formats. This compatibility package released by Microsoft itself allows you to view new Office 2007/2010 files also in Office 2003 and earlier without having to convert them first. It does not require any configuration. Just download and install it to start opening, editing and saving Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007/2010 files even with older versions of the suite. Download from here.
Corrupt DOCX2TXT
When importing large amounts of Word documents from CD or DVD, it can happen that you have to deal with corrupt docx files that do not open properly. Corrupt DOCX2TXT is a small free application that allows you to restore corrupt Word files, or rather to recover the content of the latter by transforming it into plain text in txt format. Unfortunately this clears all the information and does not restore any images present in the files, but in emergency cases it can be very useful. To work, it needs the . Net Framework 2.0 from Microsoft. Download from here.
Word programs
