Rutba Office
Thirteen apps, one installer
They share a shell, a design system and a set of shortcuts, so the second app you open behaves like the first. They also share an engine, which is the part that decides whether a file survives being edited.
You choose which of them you want, in the installer or later from Choose apps in the launcher. An app you leave out is not shown and does not open its kinds of file, and it stays installed, so it can be turned on again at any time.
Under each app are pictures of its features at work, and beside most of them a short film of the app in use. Press one to see it larger, or take the tour to see them all.
Every account, every archive, one inbox
IMAP and SMTP for the accounts you use now, and the archives other clients leave behind. Outlook .pst and .ost are read in full: folders, messages, recipients and attachments, straight out of the file rather than through Outlook. Each account has its own signature, in plain or rich text with a picture if you like. A message can wait in the Outbox and go later, automatic replies answer while you are away (turned on at your mail server where it can, so they go out with your computer off), and a junk filter learns from what you mark without sending anything anywhere to decide. An archive opens where it lies, read only, and one search covers every account and every archive at once, message bodies included, with the from:, to:, after: and has:attachment people already know. Export for legal hold writes a search or folders to mbox and PDF with a manifest giving each message’s SHA-256. Indexing runs on threads of its own, so a large archive never holds the window, and archives past 2 GB open in place. Signed and encrypted mail (S/MIME) is checked on this computer against the certificates Windows trusts, and Compose signs and encrypts. Several accounts can be added at once from pasted rows or a file, each found by its own domain’s records only when you press Add. An invoice or receipt attached to a message shows who it is from, its total and its due date when you open it. Double-click a message to open it in a window of its own, and a draft opens to be finished, with its recipients, formatting and attachments. A message being written can fill the whole window, and goes back to its box with one click. A Safety switch at the top of each message keeps links and pictures from being copied or saved until you turn it off, and View source shows the message exactly as it came.
IMAP · SMTP · .pst · .ost · .olm · mbox · .eml · .emlx · .msg
Meetings, kept on your own machine
Calendar
Month, week, day and agenda, with repeats and time zones that survive the round trip, which is where most calendar files quietly lose a meeting. Your diary lives on your own computer, and since 1.29.8 it can also keep in step with a CalDAV server you add, such as iCloud or your own. An invitation that arrives in Mail is answered from Mail, and the reply is one the organizer’s calendar understands. An event over several days is one bar across them in the month. The Hijri calendar can sit beside the Gregorian, each day’s Hijri date in the month, week and day views, and the week starts on the day your language starts it.
Reads and writes .ics (iCalendar) · recurrence rules · time zones · invitations and replies
The address book Mail completes from
Contacts
One address book behind the whole suite, so a name you have written to once is offered the next time you start typing it. A sender is kept from the reading pane in a click. Cards go out as vCard, which every other client can read, and since 1.29.8 an address book on a CardDAV server you add stays in step with this one.
Reads .vcf and CSV · writes vCard
Pages as you type, and everything Word puts on them
Documents
A word processor on a .docx engine we wrote ourselves. Pages are laid out on screen as you type, and the ruler moves indents, tab stops, margins and table columns by hand. Pictures and text boxes float where the file puts them and the words wrap round them, on screen and on paper. The ribbon is Word’s own, Home through References, Mailings and Review. Tables have Word’s Table Design and Table Layout tabs, with styles, merged cells, Draw Table, the Eraser and formulas such as =SUM(ABOVE). Home → Multilevel List has Word’s list library, Article and Section numbering included, and Define New Multilevel List makes your own, with levels linked to the heading styles so every Heading 1 reads Chapter I., II. as Word does it. Mail merge fills letters, envelopes and labels from a workbook, a list or Contacts. A table of contents, an index, a table of figures, a table of authorities, citations and a bibliography are all fields Word itself updates. Track Changes records what Word records, formatting included, and Review → Compare marks what changed between two versions of a document. A watermark can be words or a picture, and Print starts from the document’s own paper and margins. WordArt bends along an arch, a circle or any of Office’s thirty-six warps, and prints as the page shows it. Save as Template keeps a document as a .dotx in the folder Word keeps templates in, and Home offers it under Start something. Forms are made and filled as Word makes them, with content controls, a Developer tab and Restrict Editing’s Filling in forms; Redact takes marked words out of every part of a copy, from its headers to its properties; and Inspect Document clears what should not travel. Building blocks, SmartArt, 3D models, equations, a thesaurus, ink from the Draw tab and right-to-left paragraphs for Arabic, Urdu or Hebrew are there too, and a PDF keeps Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Cyrillic text. Arabic paragraphs can be justified with kashida, Word’s Justify Low, Medium and High, printed and saved as PDF with the joins between letters lengthened. As the zoom drops the pages stand side by side, two, three or six across, View, Multiple Pages shows two whole pages, and Side to Side turns them like a book. Ctrl and the mouse wheel zoom the page here and in Worksheets, Presentations and Mail, as Office does. Rutba Word was renamed Documents in 1.29, and an updated copy keeps its pins and defaults.
Reads and writes .docx, .odt, .rtf and web pages · saves as .txt or Markdown · opens .doc, Word 6/95, Word 2.0 and Write files in full · exports PDF
Real formulas, real recalculation
Worksheets
A spreadsheet with a real calculation engine, so a workbook recalculates in the right order instead of showing the values it was saved with. The ribbon is Excel’s own, every tab and group. Excel 365’s newer functions work: LAMBDA with MAP and REDUCE, XMATCH, TEXTSPLIT, VSTACK, TAKE, SORTBY and the rest of that family, beside XLOOKUP, FILTER and UNIQUE. Typing a formula colours each reference and lets you point at the cells with a click or a drag, as Excel does. PivotTables have a field list, with PivotCharts and slicers beside them. Data bars, icon sets and colour scales are drawn in the cells. Protection, Page Layout view, outlines and subtotals, advanced filter, Flash Fill and Evaluate Formula are all on the ribbon where Excel keeps them. Get & Transform (Power Query) shapes, merges and appends data from a table or a CSV file, with Pivot Column, Unpivot, Conditional Column, Fill, Merge Columns and Extract among its steps, and Automate runs scripts in the shape of Excel’s Office Scripts, each in a sealed worker that cannot reach the network or your files. A sheet can read right to left, a date can be shown in the Hijri calendar with Excel’s own format codes, and numbers in Arabic-Indic or Urdu digits. Data from Picture reads a printed table in a photo or scan into cells, shown in a preview to check before they go in, and Receipt or Invoice turns a pile of receipts into a row each, its date, supplier, tax and total checked against its own sums. Inspect Workbook and Redact clear a workbook before it travels, and in the dark theme a cell keeps its own fill with words that read on it. A workbook that once took eleven minutes to open now takes six seconds, and a sixty-thousand-row sheet scrolls at about thirty milliseconds a frame. Old files open to be saved as .xlsx: Lotus 1-2-3 worksheets with their formulas working again, dBASE and FoxPro tables with their memos, Access databases read only with a sheet for each table, and SYLK and DIF. A cell whose words have looks of their own, a bold word or a red phrase, shows them and keeps them when its words are edited, and a workbook saved as .ods keeps its fonts, fills, borders, merged cells and column widths.
Reads and writes .xlsx, .ods, .csv and .tsv · opens .xls from Excel 2.1 to 2003 in full · opens Lotus 1-2-3, dBASE, Access, SYLK and DIF
Slides that survive the round trip
Presentations
A .pptx engine that reads the package, follows the master and its layouts, and draws each slide as PowerPoint would, so a deck from PowerPoint still looks like itself after you edit it. Every shape moves, resizes and turns by hand, with Edit Points for its outline, pattern fills, 3-D and the effects PowerPoint writes. Tables are drawn in their table style, and SmartArt, WordArt, equations and charts go on a slide from the Insert tab. There are eleven themes, the Slide Master with notes and handout masters, transitions with sound and animations with their pane. Video and audio play in the show. You can record narration and timings slide by slide, with the camera too where a slide has a cameo, and export the deck to video. Print keeps its choice of slides, notes or handouts in the deck, where PowerPoint keeps it. Motion paths, effects by paragraph, 3D models, a live camera Cameo, custom shows, Zoom links and ink from the Draw tab are there too. Review, Compare merges a reviewed copy of the deck and lists every change, slide by slide and shape by shape, to accept or reject, as PowerPoint does. Redact and Inspect Presentation clear what should not travel, ink is kept as PowerPoint keeps it, the slide show has a pen and a highlighter, and comments take mentions, edits and Resolve. Design Ideas suggests layouts for the slide, worked out on your computer rather than by a service, and a paragraph can read right to left. A box is typed in with its words in their own font, size and colour, and Bold, colour, size and the rest go to the words you select, the others left as they were. Presentation was renamed Presentations in 1.29.
Reads and writes .pptx and .odp · opens .ppt from PowerPoint 97 to 2003 in full · exports video
Read, comment, fill, sign, redact and put pages in order
Open a PDF and its pages stand beside a strip of thumbnails, read one at a time, two side by side or in one column, the words selectable and found by Find. Drag pages into a new order, turn them, take them out, extract them to a new file, insert pages from another PDF, split a file into parts and merge several into one, with undo for all of it. Saving never redraws a page: each goes into the new file exactly as it was, fonts and pictures included, and the original is only replaced when you say so. Recognise Text reads the words in scanned pages and writes them in as an invisible layer, so Find, selecting and copying work on a scan that looks exactly as it did; it can also find a scanned invoice’s details and turn a form’s printed tick boxes into real check boxes. Comment highlights, underlines and strikes through words and adds notes, text, drawings and shapes, written as Acrobat writes them, with a Comments pane for replies. Forms fill in place, and Fill & Sign places a signature typed, drawn or photographed, plainly a picture rather than a digital signature. Redaction takes the marked words and pictures out of the pages and out of everywhere else in the file, from its properties to its bookmarks, and saves a new file. Bookmarks and page labels survive every page operation, pages export as pictures, and Reduce File Size saves a smaller copy. Pages are drawn by pdf.js, which ships with the suite and works with the network off.
Reads .pdf · writes comments, form values and redacted copies · exports PNG and JPEG
A viewer that opens before you blink, and stays quick on a folder of thousands
Pictures
The double-click app: every common image format, EXIF read and orientation honoured, clips and sound in the same folder, and PDFs in the same window. A folder fills the window (folders inside it, chips that count it by kind, any order, three tile sizes) and draws only what is in view, so a folder of five thousand costs what a folder of fifty costs. A tile is a thumbnail the platform made once and Rutba Office keeps, never the file itself; a clip’s tile is a frame of it, not a live player. One click opens a picture on a dark stage with a filmstrip, and the picture stays until the next has decoded, so moving on never shows an empty frame. A picture can be rated one to five stars with the keys 0 to 5 and tagged, kept on this computer and never written into the file, and the filter finds both. Ctrl+R turns a photo in its file and saves it, a JPEG by its orientation tag with its pixels untouched. Batch edit resizes, converts, renames and turns upright the pictures of a whole folder, and never replaces a file without asking. Copy Text from Picture reads the words in a photo or scan, puts them on the clipboard and lets you select just the lines you want.
Every common image format · EXIF · clips and sound · PDF
Crop, correct, select, paint, layer, export
Image
A non-destructive editor: the edits are a pipeline over your file, and your original is never written to. Crop, straighten, resize and flip; auto enhance, levels, curves, white balance, exposure, highlights and shadows, sharpen, noise reduction, vignette and red eye, worked away from the window so it keeps answering; and pen, shapes, arrows and text drawn on the picture, editable until Done. Copy a picture out or paste one in, and export to the format, quality and size you actually need, with the metadata stripped or kept. Add a layer and the picture becomes the background of a layered one: text, WordArt, shapes, icons and charts on layers of their own, each with an opacity and a blend mode, adjustment layers that change what is under them, Canvas Size, Image Size and Trim, all saved as a .rimg project. Picture Format, Edit in Image in Documents, Worksheets and Presentations opens a picture here and puts it back where it was. Fourteen tools stand down the left as a photo editor has them: selections by rectangle, ellipse, lasso, wand or colour, the brush, eraser, fill and gradient, the clone stamp and healing brush, layer masks, free transform and perspective. A selection is kept in the project, a mask follows its layer through every transform, and words are typed straight onto the picture.
Saves .rimg projects · exports .png, .jpg, .webp
A player, an editor, a screen recorder and introduction videos, without a render farm
Video
A video or a sound file opens in a player first: speed, repeat, captions from a subtitle file beside it, picture in picture, full screen and the files around it in its folder, until Edit Video puts it on the timeline. Clips, stills and sound end to end on a timeline of lanes with frames and waveforms. Split, trim, ripple, close gaps and move clips between lanes with snapping to clips, markers and the beats of a song. Fit, fill, turn, flip and crop a clip; crossfade, wipe, slide, push and zoom between clips; and add titles, lower thirds, end cards and callouts. Volume, mute and fades per clip, and export with sound to MP4 or WebM, the whole project or only In to Out, in landscape, square or vertical. Projects are saved as .rvid files that find their media again when it has moved, and unsaved work comes back after a crash. Record Screen records a screen, a window or a region with the camera beside it as a second file, the microphone and the computer’s own sound, with a countdown, pause and keys that stop it from any program; the takes land on the timeline as layers you can still move and reshape. Record Voice records the microphone alone onto a sound track at the playhead. Introduction videos are made scene by scene from a template, with a teleprompter, retakes, a brand kit and a lower third, Zoom on Clicks from the pointer, captions read and written as .srt and .vtt, and export for YouTube, LinkedIn, Reels, Shorts, TikTok or email. No ffmpeg to install, no native binaries, nothing that needs a toolchain. The MP4 is encoded by the computer’s own hardware and written by the suite itself: a minute of 1080p exports in under half a minute. A library beside the preview keeps the media of the project with titles, word art, shapes, icons and sound effects made on your computer, and four starters (a slideshow, a tutorial, a vertical social video and a montage) play at once on stand-in pictures until Replace Media puts your own in their place. A clip runs from a quarter to four times its speed with its sound keeping its pitch, a sound shifts by semitones, Freeze Frame holds a picture and Reverse plays a clip backward; volume goes to +12 dB under a limiter, Lower the rest dips the music under a voice, and two sounds crossfade. The preview can play on a second screen of its own.
Reads what the browser engine decodes · saves .rvid projects · exports .mp4 and .webm
Record your screen, camera and voice as one video, and stream it live
Recorder
A small studio of its own. Five scenes, changed at any time while it records: the screen with the camera in a corner, the screen alone, the camera alone, the two side by side, and a Be right back card. The camera round, rounded or square, in the corner you choose; the microphone and the computer’s own sound with their levels; a title across the foot of the picture and your logo in a corner. Region records only the part of a screen or window you drag out on the picture, and Take Picture keeps a still as a PNG: what is shown, the screen at its own size or the camera alone, at once or after a few seconds. Record makes one finished video at 720p or 1080p, written as it goes so a recording cut short still plays, with pause and a key that stops it from any program; then play it, edit it in Video or find it in its folder. Go Live streams the same picture to YouTube, Facebook, Twitch or any RTMP server at once, encoded on the graphics chip, with a copy recorded on this computer. Stream keys are kept encrypted on this computer and sent only to the server they belong to, and nothing connects until you press Go Live. When a destination falls behind, the picture’s bitrate comes down until it catches up, and Ctrl+Shift+F8 takes a picture while Recorder is open, minimised too.
Records .webm · streams H.264 and AAC over RTMPS or RTMP
Messages and calls with your contacts
Talk
Messages and calls with the people you know, kept simple: a list of contacts on the left and the conversation beside it. Someone becomes a contact only once both of you have said so, so nobody can call or write to you out of the blue. Messages and calls go straight between the two computers; a small Rutba service only introduces them and holds a message until the other side is online. A call shows a safety code that both of you can read out, to check that nobody is in the middle. Where two computers cannot reach each other directly, the call goes through a relay you pick from a list, one Talk picks for you, or your own. You sign in with your Rutba account in your browser, at auth.rutba.io, and Talk keeps you signed in. Adding someone by their address emails them, from your own address in Mail or from Rutba’s, a few a day, and a link of your own goes to friends by any app you like or as a code a phone reads; a friend without Rutba Office accepts with a free Rutba account. Talk is one of the apps you add from Choose apps when you want it.
Messages and calls between two contacts · audio, video and a shared screen
Tables of records, related to each other, in one file
Data Files
Tables of the records you keep, in one file on your computer. A new table starts with an ID that numbers each record, and its design adds the rest: short and long text, numbers, whole numbers, currency, dates and yes/no, each required, unique or with a default. Records open a page at a time, so a large table opens at once. A relationship lets the records of one table point at a record in another, and the file keeps them from pointing at nothing. Queries are designed as in Access, with criteria such as > 10 or Like "A*", sorting and totals, or written in SQL, and saved under a name. New Form makes a form for a table, a list of names for each field that points elsewhere and the related records below. New Report lays the records on a page, grouped with totals, to print or save as a PDF. Start from one of twenty-five sample businesses (a corner store, a cafe, a barber shop, a car dealer, a builder, lettings, a clinic, a charity, HR and payroll and more), each with a year of invented records or empty for your own, from a ready-made database (Contacts, Inventory, Membership, Customers and sales, Lending library) or an empty one. Print templates lay out a record as a business sends it, an invoice, a receipt on a till roll, a payslip or an agreement, with your letterhead, to print or save as a PDF. A query can calculate a column as Access does, with Round, IIf, DateDiff, Format and the rest, and use a table as the recipient list of a mail merge in Documents. Import brings in a CSV or TSV file, or the old files Worksheets reads (dBASE and FoxPro, Access, Lotus 1-2-3, SYLK and DIF). A database is one SQLite file, and any SQLite database opens too. Data Files is one of the apps you add from Choose apps.
Reads and writes .rbase · opens .sqlite and .db · imports .csv, .tsv, .dbf, .mdb, .accdb, .wk1, .slk and .dif
All thirteen, in one download
No account, no trial, no per-app licence, and you choose the apps you want. Windows today; macOS and Linux build from source.