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

Twelve releases of Rutba Office went out between 6 and 8 October: four on the first day, three on the second and five on the third. Each one has its notes on the timeline, with the tests behind every change. This post is the short version. Each app has a longer post of its own, linked below.

The middle figure is the one we watch. Every button in the ribbons that does nothing yet is greyed out with a sentence saying what it needs, and the suite keeps a register of them. There were 257 when we started counting on 9 September. At 1.29.10 there are twenty: four in Documents, five in Worksheets and eleven in Presentations.

First, the fixes that protect your work

1.28.1 came before any of the new features, and it was a release of fixes. A few of them matter more than any feature:

• A save that cannot finish leaves the file as it was. Saving used to write straight over the file, so a full disk or a network share that went away halfway left half a document behind. The new file is now written beside the old one and swapped in at the end, in one step.
• Closing with unsaved work always asks. Cancelling a save from the close question used to switch the question off, and the next close took the work with it.
• A file dragged onto a window opens again. An update to the framework underneath had stopped every drop from carrying its path, in every app.
• Ctrl+R no longer reloads the window. It sat in the View menu as Reload, so somebody aligning a paragraph to the right reloaded the document and lost the edits. An installed copy no longer has Reload or the developer tools at all, and since 1.29.4 Ctrl+R aligns right, as its tooltip always said.
• Mail keeps a stranger’s attachment where you put it. An attachment’s name is written by the sender, and a name built to climb out of the folder was saved where it pointed. Only the last part of the name is used now.
• A password never goes over an open line. An account on a plain IMAP port now insists on encryption before it signs in, rather than taking it only when the server offered.

Two apps changed their names

In 1.29.0 Rutba Word became Documents and Presentation became Presentations. Pins, default apps and file icons carry on as they were. Rutba Word is now Documents has the detail.

App by app

• Old files. Word documents back to Word 1.0 and DOS Word, Excel workbooks back to Excel 2.1, and PowerPoint 97 to 2003 decks now open in full, and the password-protected ones open with their password. OpenDocument, Rich Text and web pages open and save whole. Old .doc, .xls and .ppt files now open in full.
• Documents. Track Changes records formatting, Replace All, sorts and paragraph marks. Compare puts two versions side by side as revisions. Tables have Word’s Table Design and Table Layout tabs, with formulas in cells. Documents tracks formatting and compares versions.
• Worksheets. Power Query, scripts in the shape of Office Scripts, LAMBDA and the array functions Excel 365 added, and copy, paste and fill that behave as they do in Excel. Power Query and scripts in Worksheets.
• Presentations. Video, audio, recorded narration, export to video, Cameo, 3D models and motion paths, with a show that obeys kiosk mode and the monitor you pick. Presentations records narration, video and your camera.
• Right to left. Arabic, Urdu and Hebrew paragraphs run from the right in documents, sheets and slides, and the PDF keeps the words as joined, searchable text. Right to left in Rutba Office.
• Mail, Calendar and Contacts. A junk filter that learns on your computer, rich signatures, and calendars and address books kept in step with a CalDAV or CardDAV server. Calendar and Contacts sync with your own server.

Several of the new features need no server at all. Design Ideas, the thesaurus, the junk filter, scripts and 3D models all run on the computer the file is on. Worked out on your own computer says how each one does it.

What it still does not do

• Other languages. At 1.29.10 the interface was English only, though 1.29.6 had already put every word of it through a message catalogue. 1.38 used that to add Urdu (Rutba Office 1.35 to 1.38), and 1.40 and 1.42 added Arabic and Hindi. Spelling is still checked in British and American English only.
• Excel’s own Power Query. Queries built here are kept in a part of the suite’s own. Excel keeps that part and opens the loaded tables, but it does not see them as its queries, and the queries Excel writes are not read here.
• Macros. A workbook’s or document’s macros are kept in the file and never run. Scripts written here are a separate thing and stay on your computer.
• SmartArt as Office keeps it. Insert → SmartArt draws a diagram as a group of shapes that Word, Excel and PowerPoint open and edit, but Office’s SmartArt tools do not act on it.
• Old formats written back. An old .doc or .xls opens in full and saves in the current format. Nothing is written as a .doc, .xls or .ppt.

Every release is still a Windows installer and a portable build. On a Mac or a Linux machine the suite is built from source. The Windows files are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen warns on first run. There is no co-authoring, and that is a choice rather than a gap.