ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors — The Complete Guide: A Free Office Suite Built Around Office Formats
ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors is an open-source (AGPL-3.0) office suite in which the Microsoft Office formats — docx, xlsx and pptx — are the native formats. For an engineering office that exchanges reports, bills of quantities and calculation sheets with clients and suppliers, this means the layout survives the trip between programs well.
ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors
ONLYOFFICE
An open office suite with high docx, xlsx and pptx fidelity, plus a PDF and form editor — for exchanging files with Microsoft Office users.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Document editor — for reports, specifications and letters.
- Spreadsheet editor — hundreds of functions and macro support.
- Presentations — for presenting a design to a client or a committee.
- PDF editor — edit text, add comments and fill in forms.
- Form creator — fillable forms, for example for inspections and approvals.
What to know
The desktop app is free for any use, including commercial. Paid: an Enterprise version with a service agreement and support, and the server and cloud products for collaboration — real-time co-editing requires connecting to such a service. Also note that ONLYOFFICE macros are written in JavaScript, so a spreadsheet with VBA macros will not run in it as is.
Related tools
For an open office suite built on the ODF format — LibreOffice. For advanced PDF editing — PDF4QT. To split and merge PDF files — PDFsam Basic.
LibreOffice
The Document Foundation
A full office suite — documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings, compatible with Office files.
Get it from the vendorPDF4QT
Jakub Melka
An open PDF editor and viewer — annotations, page organising, signing, redaction, plus a tool to compare document versions.
Get it from the vendor
PDFsam Basic
Sober Lemur
Split, merge, rotate and extract PDF pages — for drawing sets, specifications and submissions.
Get it from the vendor
SumatraPDF
Krzysztof Kowalczyk
A tiny, very fast PDF reader for Windows — opens heavy drawings instantly, and reads ePub and DjVu too.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
If you work mainly with clients who use Microsoft Office and want a free alternative that keeps the layout intact, ONLYOFFICE is a natural choice.