Rutba Office: a free desktop office suite that opens Outlook archives and leaves your files alone

Rutba Office is a free desktop office suite for Windows. One download installs nine apps: Documents, Worksheets, Presentations, Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Pictures, Image and Video. There is no account to create and no paid tier, and the suite collects no usage data. Its first public release came out on 8 September 2026. Since then it has shipped 43 releases, the latest being 1.29.7 on 8 October. Every one is still labelled beta.

We looked at what it does, what it does not, and who it is for.

What you get

Documents is a word processor that edits .docx files directly. Pages are laid out on screen as you type, and the ribbon follows Word's own layout, from Home through References, Mailings and Review. The recent releases filled in a lot of what business documents use:

• tables with Word's Table Design and Table Layout tabs, including table styles, merged cells and formulas such as =SUM(ABOVE)
• tracked changes that record formatting as well as text, and Review → Compare for two versions of a document
• mail merge for letters, envelopes and label sheets from a spreadsheet, a list or the Contacts app
• a table of contents, an index, a table of figures, citations and a bibliography, all as fields Word itself can update
• right-to-left paragraphs, ruler and tables, for Arabic, Urdu or Hebrew

Worksheets is a spreadsheet with its own calculation engine. It handles Excel 365's newer functions, such as LAMBDA, XLOOKUP, FILTER and TEXTSPLIT, which older free spreadsheets often show as #NAME? errors. It has PivotTables with a field list, PivotCharts and slicers. Data bars and icon sets are drawn in the cells, and the latest release added Excel-style range selection, the system clipboard and Paste Special. The developers say a large workbook that once took eleven minutes to open now takes six seconds.

Presentations opens .pptx decks and keeps their masters and layouts. It plays video and audio in the show, records narration and slide timings, and exports a deck to video. Themes, transitions and animations are there, along with SmartArt and WordArt.

Mail connects to IMAP and SMTP accounts, with ready-made settings for Gmail, Outlook.com and other common providers. Its unusual feature is that it reads Outlook's .pst and .ost archives directly, without Outlook installed, along with .olm files from Outlook for Mac and mbox. It has per-account signatures, scheduled sending, automatic replies and a junk filter that learns from what you mark. Calendar and Contacts store their data on the computer and use the standard .ics and .vcf formats.

Pictures is a fast photo viewer for large folders. Image and Video are simple editors for cropping, correcting and exporting pictures and for trimming clips.

File compatibility

Compatibility decides whether a free suite is usable at work, and this is where Rutba Office puts most of its effort. Its engine rewrites only the parts of a file it has edited. Charts, pivot caches, macros and embedded media that it does not change are saved back exactly as they arrived. That matters when a file goes back to someone using Microsoft Office.

The suite also opens older formats in full: Word documents back to Word 2.0 and Windows Write, Excel workbooks from version 2.1 onwards, and PowerPoint 97 to 2003 presentations. They are opened with their styles, tables, pictures and charts, and saved in the current format. Password-protected Office files open with their password, including old 97 to 2003 ones, and you can save a document with a password from File → Info. OpenDocument files from LibreOffice are read and written.

Privacy

Rutba Office has no sign-in, and the developers say it makes two network calls of its own. One is an update check and the other is a once-a-day check for notices. Both can be switched off in its settings. Mail passwords are stored in the operating system's own keystore, and spelling and accessibility checks run on the computer using dictionaries that ship with the suite.

The limits worth knowing

• Windows only, for now. The source builds for macOS and Linux, but only Windows installers are published.
• Unsigned builds. Windows SmartScreen shows a warning the first time you run the installer, because the files are not code-signed. Some company IT policies will block it for that reason.
• English only. The interface has not been translated yet, although the groundwork for translations is in place.
• No real-time co-authoring. It is a desktop suite for one person at a time on their own machine, so there is no shared editing in the browser.
• Macros are kept but never run. A workbook's VBA survives a save, but the suite will not run it.
• Still beta. The release pace is very fast, which is good for features and also means it is young. Keep a backup of anything important before editing it in a new tool.

How it compares

LibreOffice is the obvious alternative, and for most people it is still the more mature choice, with more languages and more platforms. Rutba Office is the more interesting option when Outlook archives are part of the job, or when files must go back to Microsoft Office users with nothing changed. Against Microsoft 365, the trade is depth and collaboration on one side and no account, no subscription and no data leaving the machine on the other.

Who it suits

It suits people who need to open a .pst file from an old computer without buying Outlook. It also suits anyone who wants an offline office suite with no account, small teams who exchange Office files with clients and want them to survive the round trip, and anyone working in Arabic, Urdu or Hebrew who needs right-to-left documents that open correctly in Word.

It is less suited to organisations whose IT policy requires signed software, Mac and Linux users who do not want to build from source, and teams who live in shared documents.

Price and availability

Rutba Office is free, including for commercial use, and its source code is published under the GNU AGPL v3.0. A separate commercial licence is offered for companies that want to embed its engines in closed products. The Windows installer and a portable version that needs no installation are available from office.rutba.io/download and from the project's GitHub releases page. Installed copies update themselves in the background.