ElixirOffice
An open source office suite for people used to Microsoft Office.
ElixirOffice edits Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents (and their OpenDocument equivalents) with the ribbon, menus, dialogs and keyboard shortcuts of Microsoft Office. It runs as a desktop app that works entirely offline, or in the browser on your own server. It is free software (AGPLv3), private by design, and fast.
Status: beta. Expect rough edges, and please report them. Known limitations are listed in the release notes.
Why this project
My partner is a teacher. Like many of her colleagues, she has been offered the open source office suites at school again and again, and every time she went back to Microsoft Office. Not out of brand loyalty: the alternatives felt unfamiliar, documents from colleagues did not look right, and the habits of years (the ribbon, the shortcuts, where things are) did not work anymore.
They would love an office suite that is open source and easy to use. ElixirOffice is an attempt at exactly that: keep the strong, mature engine of an existing open source suite, and rebuild everything people touch so that a Word, Excel or PowerPoint user feels at home on the first day, with documents that look the same as in Microsoft Office.
What makes it different
- It behaves like Microsoft Office. Same ribbon tabs and groups, KeyTips (Alt), mini toolbar, quick access toolbar and contextual tabs, and the same keyboard shortcuts: 228 Word shortcuts on Windows and 171 on macOS, plus Excel and PowerPoint habits. Muscle memory keeps working.
- Your documents look right. We measure layout against Microsoft Word on a corpus of real public documents and fix what differs. Free metric-compatible fonts keep line and page breaks without Microsoft fonts, and the fonts installed on your computer are used when you allow it. School fonts (Marelle and Seyes-ruled cursive) are included.
- Private by design. No telemetry, no account, nothing sent to the publisher. In the desktop app, documents are converted and edited entirely on your computer.
- AI only if you want it. The suite is complete without AI. Ask Elixir can rewrite and restructure documents, write formulas, build charts and pivot tables, or draft slides, with the service of your choice, including one you host yourself. It is off by default and nothing is sent without your consent and an explicit request.
- Your own cloud. The server version connects to Murena Workspace and Nextcloud (secure Login Flow, revocable app password): browse, open, save with conflict protection, and co-edit under your real name.
- International. 45 interface languages, chosen independently of the document language; 49 spelling dictionaries; a thesaurus in 17 languages; Chinese, Japanese and Korean text.
More things you will like
- Signed updates: the Windows installer and the AppImage install verified updates from inside the app; automatic installation stays off unless you turn it on.
- Interface size from 80 % to 200 %, separate from the document zoom.
- Mail merge from a CSV or Excel file to one document, one PDF or one PDF per recipient.
- Comments in the margin like Word, Track Changes, Outline, Read Mode, Draft view, split window, block selection and fields.
- AutoCorrect while typing, spelling suggestions on right-click and an offline thesaurus (Shift+F7).
- Excel and PowerPoint habits: Flash Fill (Ctrl+E), Quick Analysis (Ctrl+Q), Auto Fill Options, chart galleries by type; Slide Sorter, sections, Selection pane and Presenter View.
- PDF made on your computer, with the fonts you see on screen.
- Pictures that stay where you put them, and tables that behave.
- An optional compact title bar on Linux/X11.
The complete comparison: docs/differences.md.
Fast, thanks to an optimised WebAssembly converter
The document converter (the C++ engine that reads and writes .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, .odt, .ods and .odp) is compiled to WebAssembly and runs inside the browser or the desktop app:
- native WebAssembly exceptions and a reworked static initialisation halved the module (106 MB to 53 MB) and made large documents open about ten times faster than a plain build;
- a 97-page Word document is converted in about 0.4 s; saving it takes 0.08 s;
- the module downloads once, 3.1 MB compressed (Brotli), then stays in the browser cache;
- PDF export uses the same native PDF writer as the server, in the browser: same quality and same file size as a server-made PDF, with no upload;
- only the fonts a document uses are loaded.
On a modest laptop (Intel i5-8265U), a 97-page document becomes editable in about 3.5 s, layout continues in the background, and typing latency stays around 30 ms. Measurements and methods: docs/wasm.md, docs/perf.md, docs/desktop-options.md.
Screenshots
In your language (here French, German and Japanese):
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
