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Rutba Office

The free desktop suite, release by release: what it opens, what it writes, how it is tested against files Microsoft Office actually produced, and why a business software company gives one away.

47 parts · about 200 minutes to read them all

  1. Part 1 · 4 min read

    We wrote an office suite and gave it away

    Nine desktop applications, our own document engine, and the Outlook archive formats almost nothing else opens. Free under the AGPL, no account, no telemetry. And a commercial reason it is not charity.

  2. Part 2 · 6 min read

    Why nobody sells an office suite any more

    Every office suite you can name is free, subsidised, or the doorway to something else. So we did not try to sell ours. We sell the engine underneath it, and the speed to close a gap you still have.

  3. Part 3 · 3 min read

    Calendar and Contacts arrive in Rutba Office, and a meeting invitation is answered where it lands

    The free suite is nine applications now. Calendar reads and writes .ics, Contacts reads .vcf and CSV, an invitation is accepted from inside the message it arrived in, and addresses complete from your own book.

  4. Part 4 · 3 min read

    An email address and a password is enough

    Adding a mail account used to mean an IMAP host, an SMTP host, two ports and two encryption settings: a form most people cannot fill in about their own mailbox. All of it is knowable, so Rutba Office works it out.

  5. Part 5 · 3 min read

    We test against files Microsoft Office actually wrote

    A document engine tested against files its own authors made is tested against their understanding of the format. So our fixtures are written by Excel, Word and PowerPoint themselves, and the first run found four things we had wrong.

  6. Part 6 · 3 min read

    OpenDocument, written, not just opened

    Reading .odt, .ods and .odp but saving them as something else is half a promise. Rutba Office now writes OpenDocument too, so a file that arrives in an open format leaves in one.

  7. Part 7 · 3 min read

    Rutba Office now tells you when a release is waiting, in every window

    Rutba Office has installed its own updates when you quit since version 1.7, and said so only on the launcher. From 1.13 a release is announced in every window the moment it is found, and each release is proved by watching the last one update itself.

  8. Part 8 · 4 min read

    The ruler in Rutba Word now moves things

    Rutba Word lays a document out on pages as you type, and since 1.12 its ruler is a control rather than a picture: drag an indent, a tab stop, a margin or a table column, and the file is written the way Word writes it.

  9. Part 9 · 3 min read

    Three hundred photographs, and a window that stays still

    Rutba Office’s picture viewer crawled on a real folder: every tile decoded a whole file, every clip was a running player, and moving on emptied the screen before the next picture arrived. All four causes are gone in 1.14.

  10. Part 10 · 3 min read

    A picture that floats on screen should float on paper too

    Rutba Word has wrapped words round a floating picture since 1.11, and then printed it as a block under the paragraph, which is the kind of difference that is only discovered at a printer. In 1.15 the page prints what the screen shows.

  11. Part 11 · 6 min read

    Rutba Office after its first thirty-one releases: what closed, what is open, and who should wait

    Thirty-one releases between 8 and 21 September closed most of the list we wrote on day two. Here is that list read back: what is in an installer, what is only in the source, what is still open, and who should not switch yet.

  12. Part 12 · 3 min read

    Rutba Word caught up on the page: footnotes, borders, watermarks and scans

    Eleven releases of Rutba Office in two days, and most of what they did to Rutba Word happened on the page itself: footnotes at the foot of it, borders round it, a watermark behind it, and a sheet of scanned cards that finally prints as it looks.

  13. Part 13 · 4 min read

    Worksheets and Presentation grew up in two days

    The same eleven releases turned Rutba Office’s spreadsheet and slides from viewers that could edit into tools you can build with: sheets from the tabs, tables, sorting and tracing in Worksheets; the Format Painter, footers and find-and-replace in Presentation.

  14. Part 14 · 10 min read

    Three releases in two days: password-protected files, mail merge and themes

    Rutba Office 1.26, 1.27 and 1.28 open password-protected Office files, run a mail merge with envelopes and labels, record tracked changes as you type and put a theme on a workbook, and 1.28 fixes a window that stayed hidden after updating.

  15. Part 15 · 4 min read

    Calendar and Contacts now sync with your own server, and Mail has a junk filter that learns locally

    Rutba Office 1.29.8 keeps Calendar and Contacts in step with a CalDAV or CardDAV server such as iCloud or your own. Mail files junk with a filter that learns from what you mark, without sending a message anywhere to decide.

  16. Part 16 · 5 min read

    Documents now tracks formatting changes, compares two versions and builds tables as Word does

    The word processor in Rutba Office 1.29 records formatting, sorts and paragraph marks under Track Changes, compares a document with an older version, and has Word’s Table Design and Table Layout tabs, with formulas in cells.

  17. Part 17 · 4 min read

    Old .doc, .xls and .ppt files now open in full, all the way back to Word for DOS

    Rutba Office 1.29.5 opens Word documents back to Word 1.0, Write and DOS Word, Excel workbooks back to Excel 2.1 and PowerPoint 97 to 2003 decks with their layout kept. Since 1.29.6 the ones with a password open too.

  18. Part 18 · 6 min read

    Power Query, scripts and Excel 365’s newer formulas, in a free spreadsheet

    Worksheets in Rutba Office 1.29 shapes data in a Power Query editor, runs scripts written like Office Scripts in a sandbox that cannot reach the network, and calculates LAMBDA, XMATCH and the array functions Excel 365 added.

  19. Part 19 · 5 min read

    Presentations records narration, plays video and puts your camera on a slide

    The slides app in Rutba Office 1.29 plays video and audio, records a narration per slide, exports the deck as a video, shows your camera live in a Cameo, and moves shapes along motion paths that PowerPoint plays as its own.

  20. Part 20 · 4 min read

    Right to left in Rutba Office, and PDFs that keep Arabic, Urdu and Hebrew as text

    Since 1.29.4 a right-to-left paragraph runs from the right margin in Documents. By 1.29.10 it reached tables, sheets, slides and the PDF, where Arabic letters join, Urdu keeps its own forms and the words still copy out as text.

  21. Part 21 · 6 min read

    Rutba Office 1.30 to 1.34: a release of repairs, then the features

    Five releases of Rutba Office went out on 9 October. 1.30 put right what a careful reading of 1.26 to 1.29.10 found, and 1.31 to 1.34 added WordArt that bends, templates of your own, recording with the camera and Word’s multilevel lists.

  22. Part 22 · 5 min read

    Rutba Office 1.35 to 1.38: the whole suite in Urdu, and no window waiting on another

    Four more releases on 9 October. 1.38 puts every window of Rutba Office into Urdu with its frame right to left, 1.37 moves the work on documents off the process every window shares, and 1.35 and 1.36 add Power Query steps and Word’s own lists.

  23. Part 23 · 2 min read

    Rutba Word is now Documents, and Presentation is Presentations

    Since Rutba Office 1.29.0 the word processor is called Documents and the slides app Presentations, so their names match Worksheets, Contacts and Pictures. Pinned icons, default apps and file icons carry on working after the update.

  24. Part 24 · 5 min read

    Twelve releases in three days: what Rutba Office 1.28.1 to 1.29.10 changed

    Between 6 and 8 October Rutba Office went from 1.28.0 to 1.29.10. Old Office files open in full, Worksheets has Power Query and scripts, Presentations records narration and video, and Calendar syncs with a server you choose.

  25. Part 25 · 4 min read

    Worked out on your own computer: the Rutba Office 1.29 features that need no server

    Design Ideas, the thesaurus, the junk filter, worksheet scripts and 3D models arrived in Rutba Office in October. Each one runs on the computer the file is on. Here is how, and what does still go over the network.

  26. Part 26 · 4 min read

    Rutba Office in Arabic and Hindi, with Hijri dates and kashida

    Between 9 and 10 October Rutba Office finished its Urdu, added Arabic and Hindi, and learnt what each language needs beyond its words: Hijri dates, Arabic and Devanagari digits, a Find that ignores vowel marks, and Arabic justification in print.

  27. Part 27 · 4 min read

    Rutba Office 1.43: a video editor with a timeline, and pages side by side

    Video becomes an editor with clips, sound, transitions and titles on a timeline. Image gains quick edits and tone tools, Pictures edits a whole folder at once, and Documents lays its pages side by side as Word does, with Ctrl and the wheel to zoom.

  28. Part 28 · 6 min read

    Rutba Office 1.45: a screen recorder in Video, and layers and photo tools in Image

    Video now records your screen with your camera in the corner and builds introduction videos scene by scene, with a teleprompter and captions. Image gains layers, selections, masks and a healing brush, and a document’s pictures can be edited there.

  29. Part 29 · 3 min read

    Rutba Office 1.48 to 1.50: new ribbons, and not one greyed-out button left

    In September Rutba Office had 257 buttons that did nothing yet. Since 1.49 it has none: most were built, and the ones that only work with an online service were taken out. 1.48 redrew every ribbon, and 1.50 added forms, redaction and Compare to the editors.

  30. Part 30 · 3 min read

    Mail as an archive tool: old Outlook files searched where they lie, and exported for legal hold

    Rutba Office Mail opens Outlook .pst, .ost and .olm files and mbox archives without importing them, searches them all at once with the syntax people already know, and exports what it finds with a SHA-256 manifest for legal hold.

  31. Part 31 · 4 min read

    A tenth app in Rutba Office: PDF, from putting pages in order to redaction that removes

    Rutba Office 1.46 to 1.49 added an app for PDFs. It reorders, splits and merges pages without redrawing them, makes scans searchable, fills forms, places a signature, and redacts by taking the words out of the file itself.

  32. Part 32 · 3 min read

    Text recognition in Rutba Office that never leaves your computer

    Since 1.47 Rutba Office reads the words in scans and pictures itself, with the network off, in English, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and Japanese. Scanned PDFs become searchable, a photo’s words can be copied, and a printed table lands in cells.

  33. Part 33 · 4 min read

    Rutba Office 1.51 reads receipts and invoices, and trusts a figure only when the sums agree

    Version 1.51 turns receipts into spreadsheet rows, shows an attached invoice’s total in Mail and makes a scanned form’s tick boxes into real check boxes. It reads six languages on your own computer, and a page’s own sums decide which figures go in unchecked.

  34. Part 34 · 4 min read

    Rutba Office 2.0: redaction and inspection in every editor, and a dark theme that reads

    Rutba Office 2.0, released on 15 October, finishes the review tools: Presentations and Worksheets now redact and inspect a file as Documents does, a slide show can be drawn on, and the dark theme was measured for readable text in every app.

  35. Part 35 · 4 min read

    Rutba Office 2.1: its own MP4 export at twice real time, and every app audited for accessibility

    Video now writes its own MP4 with the computer’s hardware, about twice as fast as real time. Image keeps selections and types on the picture. And every app passes an accessibility audit and works from the keyboard, with a screen reader and in High Contrast.

  36. Part 36 · 3 min read

    Rutba Office’s next version is 2.0: seventy releases in, what the new number means

    Rutba Office went from 1.0.0 to 1.51 in five and a half weeks, and from seven apps and 577 tests to ten apps and 2,576. Numbers past fifty had stopped saying anything, so the next release is 2.0: a new number for the same free beta.

  37. Part 37 · 3 min read

    Rutba Office 2.5: Recorder, an eleventh app that records your screen and streams it live

    Rutba Recorder records your screen, camera and voice as one finished video, from scenes you can change while it records, and Go Live streams it to YouTube, Facebook, Twitch or any RTMP server at once. Video now plays a file before you edit it.

  38. Part 38 · 6 min read

    Rutba Office: thirteen free, open-source office apps for Windows, in one download

    Rutba Office is a free, open-source office suite for Windows: thirteen apps in one download, from documents and spreadsheets to PDFs, mail, databases and live streaming. It works offline, needs no account except for Talk, and is free for home and business.

  39. Part 39 · 5 min read

    Rutba Data Files: a free database for small businesses, with twenty-five to start from

    Data Files, the thirteenth app in Rutba Office, keeps related tables in one file, with queries, forms, reports and print templates for invoices, receipts and payslips. Twenty-five sample businesses show it at work, each with a year of invented records.

  40. Part 40 · 4 min read

    Rutba Data Files 2.17 and 2.18: people and roles, and tables linked to PostgreSQL and MySQL

    A Data Files database can now ask who you are and show each person only what their role allows. Its tables can live in PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB, be kept as a copy that works offline, or be read from a CSV file, a spreadsheet or a web address.

  41. Part 41 · 4 min read

    Rutba Office 2.18: Tab as in Word, comments on their words, and filter arrows in Worksheets

    Rutba Office 2.18 puts right what the how-to films found. Documents gains Modify Style, comments tied to their words and tracked changes reviewed one by one. Worksheets gains filter arrows, charts that follow their cells and PivotTable filters.

  42. Part 42 · 4 min read

    Rutba Office 2.20: only the apps you choose, profiles, and mail kept in step with the server

    Rutba Office 2.20 installs only the apps you tick and adds the rest later as signed packs. Profiles keep people or kinds of work apart on one computer, Mail now makes its changes at the server, and Strict Open XML files open and save.

  43. Part 43 · 3 min read

    Rutba Office 2.21: HEIC, camera RAW, TIFF and Photoshop files, and Remove location

    Rutba Office 2.21 opens many more kinds of picture: TIFF a page at a time, Photoshop documents, EMF and WMF drawings, and HEIC and camera RAW through codecs Windows already has. Remove location takes the place out of a photo and keeps the rest.

  44. Part 44 · 6 min read

    Rutba Office 2.6 to 2.16: choose your apps, talk to your contacts, open files from the 1980s

    In two days Rutba Office grew to thirteen apps and let you choose which ones you keep. Talk brought messages and calls, Worksheets learnt Lotus 1-2-3, dBASE and Access, and Mail’s Out of office now runs at your mail server.

  45. Part 45 · 9 min read

    Rutba Data Files: twenty-five business templates, and the paperwork each one prints

    Rutba Data Files, the free database in Rutba Office, comes with a working database for twenty-five kinds of small business, from a takeaway to a landlord. Each has its tables, queries, reports and print templates ready, with a year of invented records or none.

  46. Part 46 · 3 min read

    Rutba Office how-to films: forty-nine of them, one task to a film

    Forty-nine how-to films for Rutba Office are now on YouTube and on office.rutba.io, each three to five minutes on one task, from merging PDFs to Presenter View, each recorded in the released app on files made up for the film.

  47. Part 47 · 3 min read

    The Data Files course: sixteen films from an empty file to a shop’s database

    Sixteen short films teach Rutba Office Data Files in order, on one invented corner shop: tables and fields, relationships, queries and SQL, forms and reports, then till receipts, invoices and a mail merge printed from the shop’s own records.

Other series

Rutba SignRutba RelaySelling RutbaThe affiliate programmeHow we chargeThe shop and the tillAcross RutbaSigning inRutba AssistantThe suite on filmRutba Assistant at work
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