Leave Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office was, for a time, the work itself. Word, Excel, PowerPoint: the language every office spoke, sitting on top of Windows. It was hard to learn, the file formats became “official paperwork,” accounting said you could not live without Excel, a presentation meant PowerPoint. Looking for an alternative felt stubborn, because the work really did end there.

The problem is what that power turned into: a cartel that left no room for anyone else to live.

Adobe often bought rivals and finished them. On the office side, Microsoft’s method was quieter: hold the operating system, bundle the suite, lock the format. In the DOS years the king of word processing was WordPerfect, the king of the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3. Windows arrived, Microsoft pushed its own Word and Excel, then put them in one box called Office. You could no longer fight a single program. Not beating rivals. Closing the field: “you already have Word, so take Excel, take PowerPoint.” School, state, company template. If it will not open, you are the one at fault.

Then came the format. .doc, then .docx / .xlsx / .pptx. The OOXML fight at ISO: sold as an “open standard,” in practice the key to Microsoft’s house. ODF stood on the other side; for years the sentence “it breaks in Office” sat on top of every alternative. What broke was often not the file. It was the lock.

They also bought things and let them thin out inside the house. They took Skype; the default call of an era faded, vanished, and Teams took its place. Teams does not even stand as a product on its own: it comes buried in Microsoft 365, with the line “you are already paying,” a wall that Slack and Zoom have to fight as separate software. FrontPage is gone. They are slowly burying Publisher too. Things you did not ask for get installed: OneDrive, Teams, a mandatory account, a browser reminder. Even when you uninstall, Microsoft’s house steps in.

The price is the same mindset as Adobe. You used to buy Office 2010 or 2016 once and you were done. The real offer now is Microsoft 365. Monthly, yearly, family, work. You also pay for the Outlook you do not use, the OneDrive, the Copilot quota. When the license ends, the file stays; the ribbon, the template, Save, “this feature requires a subscription” disappear. Perpetual Office is still sold in a corner. That is not the shop window. The window is rent.

For a long time, the way out did not look like a way out.

OpenOffice

It was a hope. It came from StarOffice, it was free, it was the first time “you do not need Microsoft” sounded serious. Then Oracle, then Apache, then it almost stopped.

LibreOffice

It climbed out of that corpse. At first it really worked: desktop, Windows / Linux / macOS, Writer / Calc / Impress, no bill. Then years passed. The interface stayed in 2010, complex Word files still slipped, macros still broke. “LibreOffice just ruins it” settled in offices. Not developing is helping the rival. They buttered Microsoft’s bread: an alternative appeared to exist, the alternative was not enough, everyone went back to 365.

OnlyOffice

This is finally something else. Not an OpenOffice grandchild that “opens Microsoft files well enough,” but software written to live with .docx / .xlsx / .pptx. The ribbon looks familiar. The file betrays you less. There is a free desktop tier. At last a suite you can call a real alternative.

Then politics stepped in. Trump’s spoiled selfishness — I set the rule, I hold the data, an ally is a tenant too — reminded Europe that office software is also a sovereignty problem. When the cloud depends on Washington’s mood, paperwork stops being Redmond’s rent and becomes a risk. First they held on to OnlyOffice: Nextcloud, the public sector, your own server. It was not enough. To keep the code, the roadmap and the cloud in Europe they brought out Euro-Office. A fork of OnlyOffice, on stage in 2026 around Nextcloud and IONOS. It has not finished everything. The point is no longer “free OpenOffice is enough.” It is: we will have our own office.

Google Docs, iWork, other clouds are still there. Those are locks too; the lock is just on another door. “I left Office and gave the account to Google” can be an exit. It is not an escape.

AI here is not a late thrash like Adobe’s Firefly. Microsoft Copilot has to be taken seriously, not because the models are weak, but the opposite: they bury AI inside 365 and put a new rent on top of the old lock. It will write, make slides, summarise a sheet. You do not need Word’s yearly bill for that. Copilot is the new version of the sentence “you cannot live without Office.”

Leaving Microsoft Office does not mean Word was never good. They were right, for a time. Then they used Windows as a lever, made the suite a requirement, the format a lock, the bill a subscription. WordPerfect and Lotus were cleared off the field, Skype thinned in their hands, Teams arrived in the bundle, Copilot grew the rent. Open source sat still for years too, so it was not they who held the lock. They strengthened the excuse.

Letters, minutes, sheets, decks — for most of that work the rent is not required. OnlyOffice is here, Euro-Office is new, LibreOffice still finishes paperwork. Habit is expensive. The license is more expensive. Europe woke up late. Late is better than never.