OnlyOffice Desktop Editors: All your office editing needs in an alternative to Microsoft Office

This open-source Office alternative allows you to work with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations side by side.

-  MICHAEL ANSALDO

OnlyOffice is a business-class productivity platform designed for internal team collaboration. While most of its products are targeted at small and enterprise businesses, it also offers a Microsoft Office alternative for home use. It’s unique in that it includes document, spreadsheet, and presentation editors in a single desktop app. It works with most popular file formats, including DOCX, ODT, XLSX, ODS, CSV, PPTX, and ODP. Best of all, it’s free to use on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.

HANDS-ON

Like most Office alternatives, OnlyOffice hews to the Microsoft ribbon interface. The tabbed toolbars are uniform across all three editors. Home is where you’ll find editing and formatting tools; Insert allows you to add images, shapes, and other elements to your document, spreadsheet, or presentation; the Layout tools control page margins, orientation, and size; and so on. Each editor also includes tool tabs specific to its document type—the document editor’s References toolbar offers options for adding a table of contents, footnotes, hyperlinks, and image captions, while the spreadsheet editor has tabs dedicated to formulas, data, and pivot tables.