I know I'm a moron. In my sleep deprived state as I was cleaning my school laptop drives I accidentally deleted microsoft 365, which had microsoft word. The only real downfall was I used it for the reference and citation builder feature. The biggest bonehead move is when I bought this laptop I never setup the system recovery partition. My question is, does anyone know of a free version of word or a comprable program? Or better yet, how to recover my old word with out the system back up set up?

Are you saying that you wiped the entire drive? In that case, you'll definitely need to install the operating system and all of your programs.

If you have no means to install Office, you can try an open source alternative, such as LibreOffice.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

If you had a Microsoft 365 subscription, you should have an account. Log into it and download the desktop applications.
Download and install or reinstall Office 365 or Office 2021 on a PC or Mac