What is betteroffice?

BetterOffice is an open-source office suite built around a set of document engines written in Rust. It handles the three main Microsoft Office file formats, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations, and its focus is on editing, rendering, and real-time collaboration on those files. The core engines compile to WebAssembly so they can run directly in a web browser, but the project also offers a native Rust API and headless server APIs for use outside the browser. The project is organized as a collection of packages. For documents there is a framework-free editor core that handles parsing, collaborative editing, and page layout, plus a ready-made React component for dropping a document editor into an existing app. The same pattern repeats for spreadsheets, with a typed Rust API for opening, editing, calculating, and saving XLSX files, a WebAssembly-powered core, and a React editor component. Presentations follow the same structure, with a Rust API, a WebAssembly core covering the slide model and rendering, and a React editor. Inside the repository, the Rust engines live under crates, the TypeScript editor packages live under packages, and there is a Next.js web application that powers the project's own site, betteroffice.dev, deployed on Cloudflare Workers. To build the project locally, a developer installs dependencies with the bun package manager, compiles the WebAssembly assets for the spreadsheet and document engines, and can then run the web app in development mode or run the Rust formatting, linting, and test suite. The project is licensed under Apache 2.0 and asks first-time contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement before their pull request can be merged.