- Report: #1494858
Complaint Review: WPS Office - Zhuhai Zhuhai
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WPS Office
Zhuhai, Zhuhai, China
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Wps.com
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WPS Office WPS office suite Kingsoft fraudulently charged for premium services. Misrepresented compabilty. Zhuhai Zhuhai
The audacity of this company is astounding. They somehow tricked me into agreeing to buy a premium version of their office suite, made it virtually impossible to unsubscribe, and continued to charge my debit card account after I complained. This is a long missive, but really interesting just to reveal just how evil a (Chinese-based) corporation can be. I installed the WPS office suite on both my Android cellphone and my Windows 10 laptop, with the idea that I could tippy-tap on stories on the phone when I couldn't sleep / didn't want to type sitting down.
The idea was to get interconnectivity with my main computer application, Word. But lo! When using freeware, there is always a small glitch or two - - virtually always to the benefit of the freeware corporate owner. There were a few. Turns out that WPS is not entirely ad-driven. After a year, they want you to pony up an annual fee, same as Office 365. Except Office 365 is an industry standard. That's why I started using WPS in the first place.
I thought it was free. I could write in docx format and edit on my laptop. Pretty nice. Except WPS is not Word. Spelling check (spell check is for wizards) doesn't work at all on the Android version, at least for me. And the software on both platforms lacks Word's synonyms and built in on-the-fly dictionary lookup. The desktop version of WPS has a spelling check, but it is not intuitive and it's not on the fly. You have to stop and invoke it. So if you spelled Qballah wrong all through the document, you have to do find-change over and over. No problem, right? I just do top edit on Word, with its global spelling check.
Turns out that WPS will, indeed, save in Word's docx format. But a document created in WPS Android won't spell check on Word. WPS won't tell you that up front, though. In shorter documents, you'll probably just assume everything is alright. It ain't. However, WPS will spell check you just fine, on docx-format documents created under WPS. And you'll get used to the interface eventually. And you'll start using their format for inserting pictures eventually and by the end of the trial period, you will just pay the 20 bucks because you're used to WPS now. And you don't even consciously have to switch over.
When installing the WPS suite, it changes your defaults. So every time you click on a docx file, it opens up in WPS. The interface looks similar and you probably won't even notice until you go to save. The answer, of course, is to uninstall WPS and use the Office suite which includes Word, even though it costs money up front. Then, all the commands are the same or similar on both Windows 10 and Android. I bought a Microsoft Office suite off the internet for $39.95, the computer-native version. Funny thing, though. WPS says that somewhere along the line, I signed up for the premium version. I did not. And even after I deleted WPS from my phone and Windows 10 laptop, WPS charged me $3.99, which they would deduct from my account every month. So okay. Maybe I inadvertently signed up.
I went online to cancel my account, which turned into an Alice-through-the-looking-glass adventure. It took me more than an hour. And WPS dinged me again for the $3.99 in fraudulent charges. I complained and asked for a response. Next month they took out another $3.99. And they hid the charge as KSO CO LTD, for a second month in a row. My righteous ire aroused, I called my bank and made sure no more automatic withdrawals can be made by this Chinese-based company - - which no doubt protects them from US-originated complaints.
I wrote the Better Business Bureau and filed an FTC complaint, out of sheer outrage. WPS Office sounds too good to be true. It is. It’s substandard in functionality, deliberately deceitful in how it behaves and imposes fraudulent charges.
