Articles
The questions this software exists because of
Each of these answers a real question properly, including the parts of the answer that point somewhere other than us. Our own product appears in one section at the end of each, marked as ours — because an article that hides the recommendation until the reader has been softened up is not an article.
8 September 2026 · 8 min read
How to open a .pst file without Outlook
A .pst is a complete mail archive in one file, and almost nothing outside Microsoft Outlook can read one. Here is what is actually inside it, what your options are, and which of them will lose data.
Read it →
8 September 2026 · 7 min read
What is an .ost file, and can you recover mail from one?
An .ost is Outlook’s offline copy of a server mailbox. It is not an archive, it is not supposed to be portable, and when the account behind it is gone it becomes one of the more awkward files in computing.
Read it →
8 September 2026 · 7 min read
Why your .docx looks different in another program
It is rarely a rendering bug. Most formatting loss happens at save time, when a program rebuilds a file it only partly understood — and that is a design decision, not an accident.
Read it →
8 September 2026 · 6 min read
What is actually inside a .docx file
Rename it to .zip and look. Understanding the parts explains almost everything about why documents behave the way they do between programs — and lets you fix a corrupt file by hand.
Read it →
8 September 2026 · 9 min read
Free alternatives to Microsoft Office, honestly compared
There are four serious ones and they are good at different things. The right answer depends almost entirely on who receives your files and whether you need to work offline.
Read it →
Also
The comparisons are next door
Rutba Office against each of the five alternatives, and four head-to-heads between products that are not ours at all.