Alternatives to Word

I use Windows 10 in my laptop but main productivity is in my Windows 7 desktop, where MS Office 2010 is installed.

I have no intention of subscribing to 365. But I occasionally need a text editor and even more occasionally need to write a letter or document for insertion into one format or another. I would not need all the other components of an office suite.

What are my alternatives and how do I make the selection the default for opening documents that I want to open in my laptop? I have a few Word templates in my desktop computer, such as letterheads. It would very occasionally be useful to have those available to me.

Thanks.
Bill

You could try AbiWord
AbiWord
Download is only about 8 mb

Maybe Open Office. Might be a little more than you want. Not sure if you can install only the Word portion.

Apache OpenOffice - Official Download

Thanks guys. Abiword now installed and will give it a go. First thing to note is that it has adopted some word files saved to the desktop but not a couple of .docx files.

Have you tried using Word Online? You don't need to subscribe to Office 365.

Microsoft Word Online - Work together on Word documents

Wordpad is installed on all Windows 10 machines, and will open and save docx, odt, rtf and txt formats.

click
type wo
pause briefly then press enter, and you are up and running Wordpad in most cases (if not type more of wordpad until it works properly - you may have a similarly named app.)

If you immediately file save, and save as type docx, you will have a template document called document.docx saved in your documents folder.

You can format this to your liking, including creating a letter heading and saving that as letter.docx as a letter template.

You get the point.

If you go to the file save dialog again,, right click any docx file, and select open with... - you can select Always use this app to open docx files.

You can make rtf, txt and odt templates to associate with wordpad too.

If you want to create pdf files instead, you can use the file print menu to print to a PDF file.

I think if you change your old templates name extension to the extension docx, they will also open in Wordpad.

Corel WordPerfect can be purchased for about $30 on ebay. I prefer WordPerfect to Word.

I installed LibreOffice after installing Win 10. It's free. Haven't written anything with it yet, but it opens all my MS Office docs and spreadsheets.