Recommended Office Tools

Cloud office suites like Google Docs and Microsoft 365 read, index and profile everything you write, from private letters to financial plans and increasingly feed it to AI models. A privacy-respecting office suite keeps your documents on your own machine or your own server, where no vendor can mine them. The trade-off is that you give up some of the frictionless convenience of a giant hosted service and you may take on setup or self-hosting yourself. For most people the gain in control is well worth it.

How to choose an office suite

Start by deciding whether you need software that runs entirely on your own device or a collaborative service you reach in a browser. Fully local suites like LibreOffice keep everything offline with zero accounts, while browser suites add real-time co-editing at the cost of running a server or trusting a host. If you self-host, you keep control but take on maintenance; if you rely on a hosted instance, check where it is based and whether it is end-to-end encrypted. Finally, weigh format compatibility: if you swap files with Microsoft Office users, pick a suite that handles .docx and .xlsx cleanly.

Here are some things to look for.

Open source. Public code can be audited so privacy and security claims can be checked rather than taken on trust.
Local or self-hosted. Keeping documents on your own device or server means no outside vendor can read or mine them.
End-to-end encryption. When a document is encrypted before it leaves your device, even the server host cannot read it.
Microsoft format compatibility. Clean .docx and .xlsx support lets you exchange files with others without broken layouts.
Real-time collaboration. Shared editing can replace Google Docs while keeping the data on infrastructure you choose.
Clear jurisdiction and funding. Knowing where a service is based and how it makes money reveals who can reach your files and why.