Blog · a series
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.
6 parts · about 23 minutes to read them all
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.
Part 2 · 7 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
