Nextcloud has announced its new Office Desktop app, a free, open-source office suite powered by Euro-Office, for Linux, Windows, and macOS. The application allows users to create and edit documents locally, work offline, and collaborate with others through Nextcloud Hub.
The desktop application was announced in September as part of Nextcloud Hub 26 Summer. Now, ready-to-use builds are available for download, letting users install the office suite directly on their computers without a Nextcloud server for local document editing.
For those unfamiliar, Euro-Office is a European-led open-source project based on a fork of the ONLYOFFICE codebase, licensed under AGPLv3. It was established to improve development transparency, simplify external contributions, and provide an independently governed office solution.
According to its maintainers, the decision to fork ONLYOFFICE followed concerns about limited upstream collaboration, difficulties building the software from source, and proprietary components in parts of its ecosystem. The project is supported by several European technology companies and organizations, including Nextcloud, IONOS, OpenProject, Proton, and XWiki.
As for the new desktop application, it includes editors for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs. It supports Microsoft’s DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats alongside OpenDocument formats such as ODT, ODS, and ODP.
One of its selling points is offline operations. Users can open, edit, and save documents directly on their computers without an internet connection. When connected to a Nextcloud instance, the application provides access to cloud-stored files and enables real-time collaborative editing.
Moreover, users can connect multiple Nextcloud instances to the same application, allowing them to work with documents stored across different servers without switching between separate desktop clients.
The application also uses fonts installed locally on the operating system, including custom and corporate fonts. Other capabilities include digital document signatures, password protection, and restrictions on editing, commenting, and form filling.
Regarding platform availability, Linux users can download DEB packages for Debian and Ubuntu or RPM packages for Fedora and other RPM-based distributions. Windows builds are available for x64 and ARM64 systems, while macOS support currently targets Apple Silicon.
Nextcloud distributes signed builds intended for production use, while the Euro-Office project also provides unsigned community builds for testing and development. Both versions are built from the same source code, which is publicly available on GitHub.
The Nextcloud Office Desktop app is available now from the official announcement, which also includes installation details and instructions for connecting the application to Nextcloud Hub.
Image credits: Nextcloud
