Privacy Tool Spotlight: OnlyOffice
Office software rarely sparks excitement. For most of us, opening a spreadsheet feels a little too much like bringing work home. Still, whether you are planning a budget or writing a letter, a dependable word processor or spreadsheet remains a modern necessity.
Those documents are also more sensitive than they look. A household budget, a school form, or a letter to a doctor is not something you necessarily want copied to someone else's servers. Microsoft 365 and Google Docs make an account and cloud sync the normal path. That is the privacy problem hiding inside a boring app, and it is why an office suite belongs in the same conversation as the rest of the toolbox.
We have spent a long time choosing tools that help keep extra information out of someone else's hands. Many of them were fun, engaging projects we enjoy daily, such as moving to our Jellyfin media server. When it came to basic document editing, though, we simply accepted the default LibreOffice that seems to come pre-installed with almost every Linux distribution.
LibreOffice has real strengths. Its interface can feel dated, though, and converting existing Microsoft Office documents often leads to broken layouts and tedious reformatting. At the explicit request of our user community (our families), we went looking for something better. That search led us straight to OnlyOffice.
Despite being around for years, OnlyOffice is a tool most people have never heard of. It lacks the marketing budgets of Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Linux distributions almost always ship with LibreOffice as the default, so OnlyOffice rarely gets the first look. Its original focus was enterprise cloud integration rather than consumer desktop marketing, which left this capable suite as one of the tech world's best-kept secrets.
Why OnlyOffice Caught Our Eye
When we evaluate any potential addition to our privacy toolbox, we stick to a few non-negotiable principles. A tool cannot just be private. It also has to run smoothly on Linux, macOS, Windows, and mobile devices, and it has to be approachable enough for everyone in the household to use without friction.
OnlyOffice stood out on paper because it checked every one of those boxes:
- True cross-platform availability: Whether you are using the native desktop editors on a Linux workstation, a Mac, or a Windows PC, or opening documents on an iPad, the experience stays consistent.
- A familiar, modern interface: Instead of asking people to learn legacy toolbars, it offers a refined ribbon-style layout that mirrors modern office suites. That cuts the learning curve for family members.
- Strong Microsoft Office compatibility: It uses OOXML (
.docx,.xlsx,.pptx) as its primary file format, so it can open and save files without scrambling formatting or breaking layouts when you share documents with the outside world. - Privacy and local control: The desktop apps edit files on the device and do not require an account before you can type. Unlike Google Docs or Microsoft 365, those files do not live on OnlyOffice servers unless you choose to connect a cloud. If you want to go further, ONLYOFFICE Docs is a separate product you can self-host and attach to private storage like Nextcloud or a network attached storage (NAS) that supports Docker containers.
On paper, it looked like the rare utility that could meet our privacy standards and still deliver the polished, reliable experience our families actually wanted. So we installed it across our devices and put it to work.
Familiar on Day One
Upgrading software for yourself is easy. Upgrading it for several non-technical users is a different story.
Hand a non-Linux user a stock LibreOffice setup and the usual reaction is a polite sigh. Traditional menus, nested toolbars, and a 2000s-era look feel like a step backward to anyone used to Microsoft 365 or Google Docs. You can switch LibreOffice to a ribbon layout, but it still feels like a compromise layered over an older engine.
OnlyOffice solved that on day one. Out of the box, it has a clean, polished ribbon interface (tabbed toolbars) that feels instantly familiar. Icons for formatting, page layouts, tables, and track changes sit where a Microsoft Word or Excel user expects them. For our families, that meant almost no learning curve. Nobody needed a tour of margin settings or export options. They opened the app and started typing.
Another small design choice that won over our households was tabbed navigation inside a single window. Instead of launching a separate floating window for every document, spreadsheet, or slide deck, OnlyOffice opens everything into one tab bar. You can edit a letter, check a budget spreadsheet, and review a PDF inside the same application.
The verdict from our primary user community was unanimous: it stops feeling like a "Linux alternative" and just feels like modern software.
The Real-World Format Hurdle: OOXML vs ODF
The main reason we switched comes down to how these suites handle file formats under the hood.
LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF) natively, saving text files as .odt and spreadsheets as .ods. When you open a Microsoft Office file (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) in LibreOffice, the software has to translate Microsoft's format into ODF on the fly. When you save, it translates it back.
In theory, that translation layer works. In practice, it is where document layouts go to die. Complex tables shift, embedded fonts swap unexpectedly, page breaks move, and carefully crafted resumes or school assignments look broken when the recipient opens them. For our families, that meant constantly fixing formatting before sending documents to schools or workplaces.
OnlyOffice approaches the problem from the other direction. It uses Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) formats as its primary standard. When you open a .docx or .xlsx file in OnlyOffice, it treats those files as its home format, so there is no translation step into another format and back.
The difference shows up quickly in daily use. Complex documents usually keep their margins, tables, and page breaks intact, and spreadsheets hold their visual layout without a cleanup pass. LibreOffice is technically stronger if you need to open ancient or obscure legacy formats, and it is the better home for OpenDocument files. For modern documents shared with a Microsoft-dominated world, OnlyOffice has been the less annoying option. It is not a perfect clone. Macros and some very complex spreadsheets can still misbehave, so those deserve a second look before you send them.
What We Actually Did
We did not uninstall LibreOffice. We stopped using it as the default.
OnlyOffice Desktop Editors is free, runs offline, and does not ask for an account before you can type. On Linux, the Flatpak install was straightforward. On phones and tablets, the apps came from the usual app stores. The ribbon layout, tabs, and file handling look and behave the same across those devices, so nobody had to relearn the app when they switched from a laptop to an iPad.
That was enough for letters, school forms, budgets, and the occasional slide deck. When a document has to survive a trip to a school or an office that still lives in Microsoft Word, it has been the smoother handoff.
Our Verdict
For us, this was a no-brainer. The people who actually use the software are happier, and we get fewer support questions.
As the household IT folks, we would be fine living in Gedit. We are also the involuntary help desk for our families, a joy some of you already know. A tool that works for them works better for us, too.
If you are looking for an alternative, install OnlyOffice next to whatever you use now. Open the last document that came back broken and see if the layout survives. That test will tell you more than the feature list.
Remember: We may not have anything to hide, but everything to protect.
