Your guide

Wirecutter Staff

You don’t need the thinnest, lightest, or most elegantly designed items for your home office. In the space you make your living, you want reliable, comfortable, efficient tools—though it doesn’t hurt if they look nice, too. That’s why a team of three experienced remote workers spent more than 150 hours researching and testing new gear and apps, picking the most office-friendly items from The Wirecutter’s guides to find a selection of tools that we’re sure will earn their place in your workspace.

The Best Free Office Suites app downloads for Mac: Microsoft Office 2016 Preview Microsoft Office 2011 Microsoft Office 2008 Microsoft Office 2016 Goo. Microsoft Office, whether installed as a standalone set of apps or as part of the subscription-based Office 365 service, is the colossus of office suites, one that much of the world uses by default. 10 Best Microsoft Office Alternative Apps for Mac OS (2018) For someone working in an office or a person with editing skills that require Excel or Word, an alternative becomes a necessity. Along with that, even if your daily work doesn’t require such functionality, everyone needs to send Office documents from time to time. Top 4 Best Free Office Suites (2018) Johan No Comments. In this post and the video above I will take a look at some of the best free office suites. These are free alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and other Microsoft Office applications. Mac, Linux and Android. Homepage| Download LibreOffice #3 Google Drive.

To round out a work-optimized list of computer, phone, printing, and audio gear, we looked for the best software and apps that help remote workers get organized and connected. We tested apps for time tracking and task management, tax filing, web meetings, and project management, then compared and debated the merits of each to find the best fits for most people.

Once we had our picks, we set them up on our ideal standing desk, took some photos, and then, inspired by the challenge, fixed up our own home offices, as did many other Wirecutter staffers and contributors. We hope this guide provides you with your own spark to make your home office a more efficient and less stressful place to get things done.

Need a better place to put all of your stuff? Get your office furnished and outfitted with our 'Best Home-Office Furniture and Supplies' guide.

The research

Storage and backup

Desktop hard drive

Our pick

4 TB Western Digital My Book

The 4 TB My Book is reliable, fast, and cheaper than the competition.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $92.

If you need a desktop external hard drive, the Western Digital 4TB My Book is a good bet. It’s reliable and offers the best balance of speed and price of all the models in our multifile music and photo transfer tests. It’s also the least expensive. —Justin Krajeski

Portable hard drive

Our pick

2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim

The Seagate Backup Plus Slim is reliable, thin, and light, and it offers fast read and write times at a reasonable cost.

Buying Options

If you need a portable hard drive to back up important documents that’s compact enough to occasionally bring along on trips, the 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is the best choice. After about 170 hours of extensive research and testing over the past three years, we've found the Seagate Backup Plus Slim to be reliable, the most important factor for any>Our pick

Backblaze

Backblaze is economical, fast, reliable, and easy to set up.

Buying Options

Everyone who works at home should have off-site backup in addition to a local one on an external hard drive. Pay a few bucks a month, install an app on your computer that runs in the background, and your data is safely backed up over the Internet to the service. There’s no hardware to buy, no discs to swap—and your backups remain safely off-site, so even if your home office burns down or someone steals your computer, your files are secure.

Backblaze is currently the least expensive of the services I tested. It also includes all of my must-have features along with half of my nice-to-have features—including deduplication and the capability to back up external hard drives.

The best thing about Backblaze is its ease of setup. When you run the installer, it prompts you to enter your email address and password, but that’s the only decision you have to make. At the end of the installation process, Backblaze starts running immediately, backing up all of your important files. You don’t have to have any further interaction with the app, and even if you do decide to change settings, it has very few of them for you to worry about. It’s a friendly experience—and the software is native for Mac and Windows. Once it’s set up, Backblaze runs unobtrusively in the background, even with continuous backups—you’ll probably never notice it unless you open the app to check on its progress. —Joe Kissell

Network-attached drive

Our pick

Synology DS218+

Easy to set up and manage, this two-bay NAS features hardware encryption, media streaming, remote access, useful apps, and solid data protection.

Buying Options

After testing five new devices for our full NAS guide, we’ve found that the Synology DiskStation DS218+ is the speediest network-attached storage device offering support for many third-party apps. You can use this two-bay home NAS as a Web-hosting or backup device, a media streamer, BitTorrent box—or as anything else that a Linux computer is capable of running as. The DS218+ has an interface that’s easy to understand, plus it’s equipped with an Intel Celeron processor (with 2 GB of RAM that can be expanded to 6 GB) and hardware-level encryption. The DiskStation Manager’s interface pops out as a widget and shows an overview of the drive’s health.

It uses a Btrfs file system, which won’t hugely affect file-transfer speeds, but includes a feature that prevents accidental file deletion. You can access files remotely if you choose to use Cloud Station Server, the device’s optional cloud service. Its Cloud Sync package, on the other hand, allows you to back up files and folders to external cloud platforms such as Google Drive, Backblaze, Amazon, or Dropbox. Through its own apps, the DS218+ supports media playback. It supports RAID 1 drive mirroring, alerts you to drive failure, has three USB ports, including one on the front, and supports all the features Wirecutter readers have asked about, such as FTP protocol, VPN server capabilities, IP cameras, UPS compatibility, and SSDs. —Thorin Klosowski and Samara Lynn

Thumb drive

Our pick

64 GB Kingston DataTraveler Elite G2

Fast and reasonably priced, with a sturdy black metal case.

Buying Options

After doing 40 hours of research and testing the most promising contenders, we found that the best USB 3.0 flash drive for most people is the 64 GB Kingston DataTraveler Elite G2. A 64 GB drive hits the sweet spot, addressing most people’s cost and capacity needs, and the Kingston DataTraveler Elite G2 was the fastest and most reliable 64 GB drive in our real-world file-transfer tests. It’s also inexpensive per gigabyte. It has a metal case that’s sturdier than the plastic cases of our other picks, and it has a handy blinking activity light, a feature that many flash drives lack.

Kingston’s five-year warranty is average for a flash drive, but is plenty for most people’s needs. The small cap that protects the USB plug is easily to lose, but USB-A connections are durable so it’ll work fine without it. —KS

Mice and keyboards

Photo: Michael Hession

Wireless mouse

Our pick

Logitech Marathon Mouse M705

The Marathon fits a variety of hand sizes and grips, and it tracks accurately on most surfaces.

Buying Options

We spent over 130 hours researching 260 wireless mice, surveying more than 1,000 mouse users, testing 40 mice ourselves, and consulting with a panel of experts and laypeople to find that the Logitech Marathon Mouse M705 is the best wireless mouse for home office professionals. The original Marathon (it was updated in late 2018 to support Logitech Options software and eliminate a mushy thumb button) was our testing panel’s favorite, and we think i

Best Office Suite For Mac 2018