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Ely Office is an offline-first open-source alternative to Microsoft Office in Rust
Ely Office is a set of eight offline desktop apps. It replaces Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and more without an account or a cloud service.
Why it mattersA small team can replace a Microsoft 365 subscription on a per-seat budget. Every file stays on the local disk, which also removes a cloud risk for anyone handling private documents.
Microsoft 365 keeps a copy of every document on OneDrive by default. Ely Office is a new open-source project that offers the same editors with no cloud and no account. The repository sits at 1,041 stars eight days after its first commit. It is MIT licensed.
The project includes eight desktop apps. They are written in Rust with the GPUI framework. The apps run on Windows and on macOS, for both Apple silicon and Intel. The Linux build is packaged as AppImage, deb, rpm, Arch and Nix. The Linux build sits on Debian 11 and Ubuntu 20.04 or newer.
What is in the suite
Three apps cover the Microsoft Office core. ElyDoc edits DOCX and ODT files. ElyTable edits XLSX, ODS and CSV. ElyShow edits PPTX and ODP. All three use LibreOfficeKit, the engine inside LibreOffice. That means the file compatibility is the one Microsoft Office users already know from LibreOffice.
Five more apps cover the surrounding daily tools. ElyPDF reads and edits PDFs, with OCR and signatures through MuPDF and Tesseract. ElyMail runs IMAP, POP3 and SMTP, with its own mail-send code and SQLite for storage. It signs in to Microsoft with OAuth and to Gmail and iCloud with an app password. ElyTree is a Git client over the real Git engine. ElyMark edits Markdown with markdown-rs, with RaTeX for maths and mermaid-rs-renderer for diagrams. ElyAgent is listed as a second release and runs on the Kigi CLI.
What the project chooses not to do
The README says files stay in the folders you put them in. There is no account to make. There is no cloud service to call. The release pipeline signs and notarizes the macOS builds. Linux binaries are built inside an AlmaLinux 8 image, which keeps them on glibc 2.28. The apps then run on older Linux installs without a rebuild.
Ely Office does not clone the Microsoft look or the Google Docs collaboration model. There is no real-time editing with other people over a server. For a team that lives in a shared document all day, that is the main trade. For anyone who writes alone and sends the file at the end, the trade is in their favour.
Where it sits next to other open-source office projects
ArtCraft's WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft are clean-room rewrites of Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Rust. They start from zero. Matching the file format support that LibreOffice has had for twenty years will take time. Ely Office makes the other choice. It wraps the existing LibreOffice engine in a new Rust and GPUI shell. The format support is there on day one. The project only has to build the user interface.
OnlyOffice and LibreOffice itself are also in this space. OnlyOffice has a free desktop edition and a paid cloud edition. LibreOffice is free and open source but keeps the older look. Ely Office is one more option for a team that wants Microsoft Office file compatibility without a Microsoft bill.
For a small team paying a monthly Microsoft 365 bill, Ely Office is worth a working test. The recurring subscription is replaced by a one-off setup. Every file stays on the laptop. A client who sends a DOCX still gets a DOCX back.
Source
- Primary source: ELY-Open-Source/ElyOffice on GitHub.
- Related: the Ely Office download page.
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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