Microsoft Office Is Several GB, WPS Office Is Just Over 1 GB: The Hidden Engineering Behind Software Bloat

The Question

On the surface, both are office suites that do essentially the same things: word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. So why does Microsoft Office consume several gigabytes of disk space while WPS Office, the Chinese competitor from Kingsoft, needs just over 1GB?

The answer reveals a lot about how software evolves over decades.

Reason 1: 40 Years of Backward Compatibility

Microsoft Office first shipped in 1990. Every version since has needed to support files and features from all previous versions:

• Binary file formats — .doc, .xls, .ppt (pre-2007)
• XML-based formats — .docx, .xlsx, .pptx (2007+)
• Macro languages — VBA, XLM, and OfficeScript
• Legacy features — Clippy-era assistants, OLE objects, DDE links
• Ancient embedded objects — Equation Editor 3.0 (from 1991), MS Graph (from 1992)

Every one of these features requires code, assets, and test cases that ship with every installation. Microsoft estimates that over 30% of Office's codebase exists solely for backward compatibility.

WPS Office, while also a mature product (first released in 1988), made different choices about what to preserve and what to drop.

Reason 2: The Feature Kitchen Sink

Microsoft Office ships with features that most users never touch:

• Access — Full desktop database application
• Publisher — Desktop publishing tool
• OneNote — Note-taking application
• Teams — Communication platform (bundled since 2019)
• Power Query — Data transformation engine
• Power Pivot — In-memory data modeling
• VBA runtime — Complete macro execution environment
• 1000+ fonts — Typography library
• 700+ templates — Document templates for every conceivable use case
• Proofing tools — Grammar checkers for 40+ languages
• Clip art library — Yes, still included

Each of these adds tens to hundreds of megabytes.

Reason 3: Design Philosophy

Microsoft's Approach: Everything for Everyone

Office is designed as a universal tool that handles every edge case. A law firm needs different features than a classroom, a financial analyst needs different tools than a novelist, and Microsoft tries to serve all of them in one package.

WPS's Approach: Lean and Targeted

WPS Office takes a more focused approach:

• Core functions only — Write, Spreadsheet, Presentation
• Modern formats — Less legacy format support
• Cloud-first — Many features live server-side rather than in the desktop binary
• Chinese market focus — Fewer languages, fewer proofing tools, fewer templates
• Smaller macro system — Less powerful but much smaller

Reason 4: Architecture Differences

Static vs Dynamic Loading

Microsoft Office installs most resources locally for reliability and offline use. WPS Office loads many resources on-demand or from the cloud, keeping the initial footprint smaller.

Monolith vs Modular

Office is largely a monolithic installation (though this is changing with Microsoft 365). WPS has always been more modular, with features loaded as needed.

Font Bundling

Microsoft includes over 1,000 fonts covering dozens of writing systems (Latin, Cyrillic, CJK, Arabic, Devanagari, etc.). WPS includes primarily CJK and Latin fonts.

The Bloat Is Not Just Size

The real cost of Office's size isn't disk space (which is cheap) but:

• Update size — Patching 4+ GB of software means larger downloads
• Attack surface — More code means more potential vulnerabilities
• Installation time — Longer setup and configuration
• Memory usage — Office apps consume more RAM even for simple tasks

The Future

Both products are moving toward web-based and subscription models where local footprint matters less. Microsoft 365 already offers a web-only version of Office. WPS Office has always had a strong cloud component.

The real question in 2026 isn't how big the desktop app is — it's whether you need a desktop app at all.

Verdict

Microsoft Office is large because it carries 36 years of features, formats, and compatibility. WPS Office is small because it made deliberate choices to leave most of that behind. Neither approach is wrong — they optimize for different things.

If you need perfect compatibility with every Office file ever created, you need Microsoft Office. If you need to write documents and make spreadsheets efficiently, WPS does the job at a fraction of the size.

Source: Zhihu Discussion