Compatibility findings
What actually survives a move between WPS Office and Microsoft 365
In short
Standard Word documents, merged-cell tables, headers and footers, and basic spreadsheet formulas usually survive a move between WPS Office and Microsoft 365 with no visible change. The features that do not survive are Power Query, Power Pivot data models, and VBA macros that call outside the application — those are missing features, not rendering differences.
1. What this page covers
This is a list of file features and whether they carry between the two suites. It is deliberately narrower than a general review: nothing here is about interface quality, speed or price — only about whether a document still looks right after it moves.
When a feature is listed as holding up, it means it held in our sample. It does not mean it will hold in every document — a compatibility claim without a file to test against is just a guess.
2. The findings
| Feature | Result | What we saw |
|---|---|---|
| Plain text, headings, lists | Holds up | Standard paragraph formatting renders the same. Not a useful test of compatibility on its own. |
| Tables with merged cells | Holds up | Merged cells, borders and shading survived our invoice sample without drift. |
| Headers, footers, page numbers | Holds up | Field codes for page numbers and section headings worked in our sample. |
| Page breaks and margins | Check yours | Usually holds, but small font-metric differences can push a line over and cascade a page break. |
| Tracked changes and comments | Check yours | Insertions and deletions are readable, but long revision histories can display differently. |
| Basic formulas (SUM, IF, SUMIFS) | Holds up | Results matched Excel on our test workbook. |
| Charts and pivot tables | Check yours | Basic charts render. Chart styling and pivot layouts may need redoing after a round trip. |
| Power Query | Not supported | No working equivalent. Query pipelines do not carry over. |
| Power Pivot / data models | Not supported | No working equivalent. Data models do not carry over. |
| VBA macros (standard) | Check yours | Ordinary VBA generally runs. Application-specific object model calls may fail. |
| VBA calling Windows APIs | Not supported | Requires porting to WPS's JavaScript macro environment. |
| PDF form filling and annotation | Holds up | Included in the suite rather than sold as a separate product. |
3. Why the "check yours" cases exist
That middle column is the honest one. Those features are not broken, but they depend on details that differ between any two applications: font metrics, default spacing, how a particular chart style is stored in the file. The same document can hold up on one machine and shift on another with a different font set installed.
Which is why the only reliable test is your own files. Any review — this one included — can only tell you where to look.
4. How to test your own documents in twenty minutes
- Pick ten real files, not samples. The awkward ones: the invoice with merged cells, the report with a tracked-changes history nobody ever accepted, the spreadsheet with a chart someone hand-styled two years ago.
- Open them in the free build first. Do not convert anything. Look at page breaks, table borders, and where page numbers land.
- Open the same files in Microsoft 365 side by side. Compare page count first — that is the fastest signal. A document that gained a page has a layout problem somewhere.
- Then check the formulas. Pick the three cells you rely on most and confirm the numbers match. If they agree, move on; if they do not, you have found the thing that decides the migration.
- Send one file to someone on the other suite. This catches the case where it looks fine on your machine because of a font you happen to have installed.
5. The features that are simply absent
Power Query, Power Pivot and API-reaching macros are not a rendering question. They are features with no working equivalent, so the workflow has to change. If your monthly reporting is one of these, the question is not "does it look right" but "can I rebuild this" — and that is usually a project, not a switch.
6. Triage: what to check in what order
If you have one hour and a folder of real documents, spend it in this order. Each step is cheaper than the one after it, and each one can end the evaluation on its own.
Page count
Open three documents. Do not read them — count the pages. A document that gained or lost a page has a layout fault that will show up somewhere in print or in a client's inbox. This single check finds more real problems than any feature comparison.
The formulas you actually use
Not a benchmark of every function. Just the three or four formulas that produce numbers someone acts on — a margin, a tax line, a total. Compare the values, not the formula text. If they agree on your own data, the arithmetic is not your migration risk.
One round trip through a colleague
Send a finished file to someone on the other suite and ask them to open it and screenshot it. This catches the failure nobody finds alone: it looks correct on your machine because a font happens to be installed, and wrong on theirs.
Your macros and data pipeline
This is the expensive part, so do it last. If anything in your workflow imports and reshapes data automatically, or drives another application, test that specifically — because it is the one category where "it opened fine" means nothing at all.
7. Four signals that a file will not travel well
These are the characteristics that make a document fragile between suites. They are not guarantees of failure, but if a file has several of them, test that file specifically rather than trusting a general review:
- A typeface someone installed themselves. A brand font, a downloaded display face, anything the recipient may not have. Substitution changes letter widths, and letter widths change line breaks.
- Auto-fit table columns. When column width is "fit to contents", each application calculates it with its own font engine, so the table can arrive a centimetre narrower or wider.
- Text in a shape, not in a paragraph. Text boxes, callouts and SmartArt-style objects are stored differently from flowing text and are the first thing to move.
- A revision history nobody accepted. Months of tracked insertions and deletions carry a lot of hidden state. It displays differently more often than clean text does.
8. What a compatibility failure actually costs
It is rarely a catastrophe. It is the invoice that arrived with the totals column pushed onto
a second page, the proposal where the client's logo sat slightly off-centre, the budget where
one cell read #VALUE! because a number came back as text. None of these stop a
business. All of them make the sender look careless, and the second one is the reason people
quietly stop using a cheaper suite rather than admitting why.
That is worth weighing honestly: the money saved on a licence is real, and so is the twenty minutes of checking per file that keeps the output clean.
Opens the official WPS site. Prices are set by WPS Software, not by us.
9. Deeper tests on specific features
- Word table borders and merged cells — a property-by-property test with a lab capture
- XLOOKUP in WPS Spreadsheets — exact, reverse and missing-key lookups tested against Excel
- VLOOKUP in WPS Spreadsheets — syntax, the 4th argument, and every error explained
- WPS Office vs LibreOffice — which suite to pick, feature by feature
10. Sources
- WPS Office 12.1.2 Free — direct testing, November 2026.
- WPS and Microsoft product documentation — feature availability per tier.
- ISO/IEC 29500 (Office Open XML) — the file format specification both suites implement.