Rutba Office

Rutba Office is a free desktop office suite that puts thirteen apps in one download. Its makers built it around the files people already have: Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents open and save in their own formats, and years of Outlook mail archives open where they lie instead of being imported first. The core apps need no account, and the suite works with the network switched off.

The thirteen apps

• Mail: IMAP and SMTP accounts plus the archives other clients leave behind, including Outlook .pst and .ost files, with one search across every account and archive.
• Calendar: month, week, day and agenda views with repeats and time zones, optional sync with a CalDAV server, and the Hijri calendar beside the Gregorian one.
• Contacts: one address book behind the whole suite, exported as vCard, with optional CardDAV sync.
• Documents: a word processor on its own .docx engine, with Word's ribbon, tables, mail merge, Track Changes and right-to-left text for Arabic, Urdu and Hebrew.
• Worksheets: a spreadsheet with a real calculation engine, Excel 365's newer functions, PivotTables and Power Query style data shaping.
• Presentations: a .pptx engine that keeps PowerPoint decks looking like themselves, with themes, transitions, narration and export to video.
• PDF: read, comment, fill, sign, redact and reorder pages, with text recognition for scanned pages.
• Pictures: a fast viewer that stays quick on folders of thousands of images, with ratings, tags and batch editing.
• Image: a non-destructive editor with layers, masks, selections and export to PNG, JPEG or WebP.
• Video: a player and timeline editor that exports MP4 or WebM using the computer's own hardware, with screen recording and templates for introduction videos.
• Recorder: records screen, camera and voice as one video and can stream live over RTMP to YouTube, Facebook or Twitch.
• Talk: messages and calls between contacts who have both accepted each other, going directly between the two computers. Talk is the one app that signs in, with a free Rutba account.
• Data Files: related tables in a single SQLite file, with Access style queries, forms, reports and twenty-five sample business databases.

Talk and Data Files are optional and are added from the suite's Choose apps screen.

Files it opens

The suite reads and writes .docx, .xlsx, .pptx and their OpenDocument counterparts, along with .rtf, .csv, .txt, Markdown, web pages, .eml, mbox, .ics and .vcf. Older Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, including .doc, .xls and .ppt, open in full and are saved in the newer formats, and the title bar says which format a save will write. Outlook .pst, .ost, .olm and .msg files are read as archives.

Platforms and licence

Windows installers are published, both an installer and a portable build that needs no installation; the makers note that neither is code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen warns on first run. macOS and Linux builds come from the same source with one command each, producing a .dmg, an AppImage and a .deb, but no ready-made Mac or Linux download is published yet. The source code is public under the GNU AGPL v3.0, and a commercial licence is available on request.

Who it suits

• People who need Microsoft formats to open correctly without a subscription.
• Anyone carrying years of .pst, .ost or mbox mail from one computer to the next.
• Organisations that want an office suite that runs without an account or a connection.

Pricing

Rutba Office is free to download and use. A commercial licence is offered for anyone who needs one instead of the AGPL.