A new open-source project called GenOffice bills itself as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, with native editing support for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and Markdown files, according to its GitHub repository.
The suite is built as six Electron applications, covering documents, spreadsheets, slides, PDFs, Markdown and a shell, sharing a common engine layer written in TypeScript, with a Rust component handling Excel files and PDFium handling PDF rendering. Editing preserves the original file's byte structure and fonts on round trips, and the suite includes optical character recognition for scanned PDFs on macOS and Windows.
GenOffice's AI features work with multiple providers, including Claude, OpenAI and Gemini, and include built-in agent tools for web search, image generation and media analysis, all usable offline once documents are loaded locally. The core suite is released under the Apache 2.0 license, with some enterprise modules reserved, and there is no paid tier for the base product.
Most AI-native document tools ship as cloud services that require uploading files to a vendor's servers. A fully offline, open-source suite that edits native Office formats directly gives developers and privacy-conscious teams a base they can audit, self-host or fork instead of trusting a SaaS backend with unreleased documents.