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

Rutba Office has no account, no cloud tier of ours and no telemetry, and it works with the network unplugged. The October releases added several features that could easily have been built as a call to somebody’s server. They were not. This post goes through them one at a time, so you can see what each one does with your work.

Design Ideas, worked out on the slide

Home → Design Ideas in Presentations (1.29.8) offers layouts for the slide you are on: the picture to the right or left of the words, a row of pictures, the title on a band of the theme’s colour, and so on. It picks them from the slide’s own title, words and pictures, and draws each one as the slide would look. That work happens on your computer. The slide is not uploaded to be designed.

A thesaurus of its own

Review → Thesaurus (1.29.8, Shift+F7) in Documents, Worksheets and Presentations looks words up in a thesaurus that ships with the suite: some six thousand words in British spelling, with their meanings grouped under their part of speech. It is a small thesaurus, and all of it is on disk. A word with an ending is looked up by the word it was made from, and a word you click is looked up in turn.

A junk filter that learns where it runs

Mail’s junk filter (1.29.4) learns from the messages you mark as junk or not junk. It also reads your Safe and Blocked Senders lists and the spam headers your own mail server adds. Nothing is sent anywhere to decide, so the filter knows only what you have taught it on this computer.

Scripts that cannot reach anything

A worksheet script (1.29.10) runs in a worker that can reach neither the network nor a file. It gets a snapshot of the workbook, and what it changed comes back to be applied as one step of undo. A script that runs past fifteen seconds is stopped. The scripts themselves are kept on your computer, not in a service. Power Query and scripts in Worksheets has an example.

Power Query here reads a table in the workbook, or a CSV or text file you pick. Refreshing a query reads that source again on your computer.

Drawn here: 3D models and icons

A 3D model (1.29.9) is drawn by the suite’s own renderer, so it looks the same on every computer and nothing about it is sent to be drawn. Insert → Icons (1.29.2) uses the suite’s own set of icons, the same ones the ribbon is drawn with, and fetches nothing.

Your camera and your screen

• Cameo (1.29.9) opens the camera only while a cameo is on screen in the show, and closes it with the last one.
• Screenshot and Screen Recording (1.29.2 and 1.29.3) take only the window or screen you pick from the gallery, and the window that asked is left out of the list.
• Recorded narration (1.29.3) is kept in the deck, slide by slide, and goes nowhere else.

What does go over the network

Two requests are the suite’s own. An installed copy asks GitHub whether a newer release exists, and the launcher asks office.rutba.io whether there is an announcement worth showing you. Both are settings, and turning one off means that request is not made at all.

Everything else goes to servers you add yourself. Mail talks to the mail servers of your accounts. Since 1.29.8, Calendar and Contacts can keep in step with a CalDAV or CardDAV server you add, such as iCloud or your own. Those connections go only to the address you typed and carry only your own mail, events and cards. None of them goes to us. The privacy page lists all of it.