Open-source Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications | Hacker News Reader

Open-source Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications

tomshardware.com

73 pointsmathgenius85 comments

The media response to this omits the fact that these vibe coded "reverse engineered" apps hardly work and we've had open source alternatives to the Microsoft and Adobe products for years. The narrative they're pushing is a frontier model can make a perfect clone of any app, and the reality is it makes a ui that looks somewhat similar but none of the functionality actually works.

Hah, Potemkin Office Suite. Next, Potemkin OS and Potemkin phones?

Maybe that's many are convinced AI can replace developers, they can only see the surface of software and think there's not much more underneath it...

In the case of Microsoft Office native desktop applications the LLMs can figure out everything underneath through a mix of decompiling the binaries, reading the product documentation, and exploratory testing. Some SaaS is more opaque.

This is not true, most software can't be reverse engineered even if you had all of the source code, much less if you just have the binary.

Functionality piles on top of each other, products are such a garbled mess with fixes built on top of shaky grounds all over.

20% of software is code, 30% is design/strategy/marketing/telemetry/usage, rest of the 50% is lots and lots of stuff baked into software from user feedback over the decades.

Any software product that isn't in a similar balance is just crap to use, for instance Windows it's 20-30% code, 60-70% marketing/ads and the rest 10-20% bug fixes..

There is 0 user feedback being addressed.

In my opinion, AI is the thing that should be a wake up call for software companies to actually build on top of feedback proactively and with sharp intent.

I don't think you've been paying attention to what's happened in the last few months. The LLMs have gotten way better at reverse engineering and design. They might not be great at building a whole new product from scratch but cloning an existing mature application will be no problem within a year at most.

I work in a neolab/ai product company with LLMs all day. If I don't know what's been happening I am really not sure who does.

Potemkin == Omarchy

I don’t trust anything made by DHH now. He merged a PR that rewrote ttfx from rust to Claude generated asm (despite contributor objections) and then turned around and merged another that rewrote all of that into rust.

Which is to say that a normal organization would not be changing things so quickly based on the whims of a single individual.

Maybe I’d be ok to use omarchy just for fun, but could never use it seriously in any capacity.

Do you have a link for me?

Don't kick the man so hard. It must be at that point he discovered that ASM is not actually portable across CPU architectures.

Yeah though FWIW, the overall impact of companies realizing maybe they shouldn't be spending $100k a year on a document editor is likely to raise all boats for alternatives.

It remains really wild people think Office is worth $30/month/user. Anything that erodes that belief is a net positive.

i dont think anyone thinks it's worth that on its own, but you need some kind of user management (entra id in this case), some kind of cloud storage (sharepoint in this case) and some kind of standard document format (docx, xlsx, pptx in this case) in any company.

of course you can do all that with open source stuff but office is just easy to buy and hard to get rid of once you have bought in. the bigger your company the harder it is to migrate.

Entra ID is separate if you don't want logins from Nigeria. One of the most insane-to-me things is Office 365 is basically "open access by default" and you have to pay $6/month/user to fix it. Most people don't realize just how much attack surface they open up moving their data to the cloud, and that it costs a lot to even start to get back towards a secure environment like you had on-premise.

But yeah, the lock-in effect is huge. Microsoft cloud products deliberately don't work well with anything but more of their own cloud products. And as soon as you start a migration to it based on what you need, you suddenly realize how much other stuff you also need to pay them for. And you can't escape without replacing all of it.

I think a lot of people forget about the labor costs of migrating. The $30/mo looks cheap compared to all of the time spent trying to teach end users how to use something else

Part of the potential of these vibe coded clones is that the UI and workflows will be very similar to the genuine Microsoft products. So if they're actually completed and debugged then a migration won't necessarily require end user retraining.

Paying for software is perfectly fine. If people don’t want to pay for office there isn’t a lack of alternatives at all. Google doc is right here for them to use of they want a free cloud version.

The idea that companies with subscriptions are extorting users is cancerous nonsense

You've fallen prey to the "Everyone is stupid except me" fallacy.

By the time you add cloud-storage space integration (SharePoint), live collaborative editing, support hotline, support for 30 year old macros, and Active directory user integration, you'll be charging the same per seat.

But hey, proof me wrong please. Code it.

> support hotline

Have you... ever tried talking to Microsoft support?

Also wake me up when there’s a cloud version that works in an even vaguely similar way.

The Office advantage is a suite of apps and integrations with their cloud offerings. That’s their big moat against vibe-coded apps, because few vibe-coders want to maintain a SaaS service for Office files and even fewer CIOs want to commit their company to use that service when Microsoft exists and is proven to work.

> Also wake me up when there’s a cloud version that works in an even vaguely similar way.

NextCloud has had an office suite offering for many years.

The web versions are passable, but the native versions are non-extant, and the handoff story leaves much to be desired. You can’t, say, have one person editing native and one person editing on web.

Looking at the website they seem to mention a web version: https://getartcraft.com/ (I haven’t tried though)

The narrative has a point. The LLMs are getting very good at this task. I got 95% of functionality by using LLM to port our Qt desktop app to thin web client and web server. Astra medium, two prompts, 2 hours of LLM processing. Each of two LLM plans had about ten steps. The missing step for porting of these apps is to test against the original (ex. Ms office) app in the plan.

I don't know but this WordCraft works perfectly fine hasn't crashed on me and has 90% of the features already there.

Not to mention it's single binary barely 80 MB and super fast to start and very snappy.

Have you tried that or that PDFCraft?

The alternatives have always been crap and unusable and incompatible with actual professional software and this is coming from someone who loathes Windows/Adobe and tried very hard for more than a decade to not rely on Windows-only products. I know, Microsoft doesn't respect its own specs, the maintainers do a heroic job, it's free, etc. Still doesn't change the usability issues, and they've been going on for literal decades.

Funnily enough, two common retorts against criticism of user-centric open source software are:

>stop complaining and feel free to open a PR if you're unsatisfied

Seems like many maintainers are now getting what they wished for and they are somehow unhappy about it. Ooops

>feel free to start your own project

Seems like the artcraft dude literally just did that and people are somehow unhappy about it. Ooops

> The alternatives have always been crap

LibreOffice is actually fine for 99% of all paper pusher workloads. The only office app that can claim superiority is Excel.

I'd rather wish people put effort into LibreOffice. I'd hoped there would be significant improvements there as there is a huge scope of bug/compatibility fixes. But I guess it is not sexy enough.

im willing to bet its easier to generate a new office than it is to fix libreoffice

If you want a new "office" that doesn't work, sure, but you don't need AI for that.

I'm willing to take the other side of that bet. Quoting this article [1]:

> The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it.

LibreOffice has to be feature-per-feature, bug-per-bug compatible with a poorly-documented office suite that's been around for 35 years, so it's no surprise that they don't always get it right. I don't see a new office suite doing any better, unless they decide that compatibility with MS Word is no longer a priority.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

OnlyOffice, despite being newer than LibreOffice, has better compatibility with office documents and is way ahead in terms of UI. Plus it runs on Linux.

The difference is OnlyOffice actually wants to make money. Which means it needs to be good.

Isn't OnlyOffice a fork of LibreOffice?

Yeah, this entire saga is really unfortunate. The narrative is really enticing (AI is obsoleting Adobe/Microsoft/other corporate software behemoths!) when the reality is it's a vibe-coded slopware that barely functions, according to anyone who has actually tried it, and there are other FOSS alternatives which are much more stable, mature, and deserve people's attention. I wonder how many people shouting "Claude vibed a Photoshop clone, Adobe is done!!" were even aware Krita or GIMP existed.

They're not really Photoshop like though.

https://www.photopea.com/

comes closer, though I think it's web only.

My kingdom for a fully local native version of Photopea. It's by far the best Photoshop alternative I've ever used.

It is not sexy enough.

It has atrocious UX. Crazy bloat from promising to support every one-off file format under the sun for the last 25 years.

Trying to get a PR commit committed is like dealing with an entire army of bureaucrats.

So I get it would be great (in theory) if people wanted to support this, but at the same time it’s too far behind —- and the team is too entrenched in bad UX decisions, ackward support mandates for obscure systems that in reality nobody ever really used.

And this is a hill I’ll die on… Permissive licenses > copyleft. If I fork your code, as long as I put your name in the credits, the code is mine to do whatever I want with. Past authors shouldn't get a say in what I build next. That's real open source.

Can relate to that. Nowadays it's much easier for me to fork a project and fix the bugs for myself rather than convincing the maintainers that my niche bug is worth a fix and the fix is worthy.

Do they even allow AI contributions? I'd love to contribute if they do.

Some people tell me why not donate instead, and the reason is the same as me giving people actual presents instead of gift cards: I take the time to choose and understand an issue, spend time on it, just like I spend time picking a present. Both are riskier than giving money directly, but the euphoria of having my PR get merged or present being appreciated is addictive :)

This is a really interesting possible difference. Legacy open source seems to be generally trending anti-AI (although I don’t know the exact stance of LibreOffice). These new vibe-coded Adobe/MS copies are obviously AI-friendly.

Time will tell which wins.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/AI_policy

This is very, very reasonable and welcoming. Great! Thanks for sharing.

I'd rather not. LibreOffice is terrible and probably unfixable. It's certainly better than these vibecoded alternatives, but not where the effort should go. We need new leadership in the open source office space.

Just curious… why do you think that? We have been using LibreOffice in our company for 20+ years, exchanging files with customers and vendors who use MS Office in all its versions during this time. We never had a problem…

Lawyer, translator and professor here. I have an Office 365 subscription and I got native Word and other MS Office apps installed on my windows partition. But, since I use Linux on the desktop, and MS chose not to offer their office suite as Linux native apps, and they make it near impossible to use the Windows apps under Wine, I use LibreOffice.

And it works really well. I can use it and exchange documents with people using Word without problem in the enormous majority of the cases.

And the fact that LibreOffice is a real GUI app built using the WIMP paradigm instead of that stupid ribbon interface that forces me to use the mouse, is a very significant net positive for me.

People who say that LibreOffice has a bad UI or that is a bad piece of software are just more vocal.

> Most of these apps are still far from what they intend to replace, however, so we'll have to see how deep this message cuts

Has the author even opened the apps, let alone tried to use them?

> GridCraft on getartcraft.com

> WordCraft on getartcraft.com

> 404 This page could not be found

(though, "to be fair", not existing is "far from what they intend to replace")

I've been thinking about this these days, this is the final revenge of open source. After having ingurgitated all the open source projects there exist in the world, AI is making basically all software un-copyrighteable (yes, you can't copyright a picture made by AI as you can't copyright a piece of software made -entirely- by AI).

Yep, I realized this back in February, you can remake basically anything in a drastically shorter span of time with a single frontier model and patience and test thoroughly.

Yes, anything, not just software. I wonder if monopolies will somehow start falling or if they will try to defend themselves, are we on a path of continuous decentralization?

I've been waiting 26 years for a Visio replacement since M$ bought it, hopefully they can do it too. No other app or web-based copies are good enough still (sorta omnigraffle if you use a mac [ew, no]), and I've tried most over the years to find one as I still use Visio weekly in 2026. It's the only reason I'll actually buy a copy of real windoze and visio for keeping around a VM, I can still buy real licenses overseas for both visio and project for ~$20usd each instead of the ~$500-1000usd actually IN the US.

This would be interesting if it was based on markdown and Jupyter notebooks and all that good stuff we have today. But just replicating what was useful some 37 years ago to get office workers accustomed to the new digital world? Why?

I don't buy the hype on these vibecoded apps, but I think an interesting use of this methodology would be to revive proprietary applications that were axed by their owners.

For example, what about a new clone of Macromedia's Free Hand? or Adobe's Page Maker? Or MS Front Page, vibecoded to be compliant with the latest W3C standards?

We should be making self driving cars with AI, not buggies

My thinking is that cloning existing apps is missing the point. It still takes a disproportionate amount of time to get all of the functionalities and quirks of the original right. But, it takes no time to get the handful of things you need working, on your system. That is where I see the most potential: there is little need for massive pieces of software that do everything, I can build the components I need, customized for my use case, and move on.

Does that actually work with Office tools? Like yes you can make your own documents and spreadsheets. But what about when you receive something from someone else? Or need to send it back after doing your edits? Do the files still work correctly?

Big part of the value is in true interoperability...

I don't think the best path towards interoperability is to run after those who based their entire business model on making interoperability a problem in the first place.

If I were to create an office suite that cares for interoperability, it would be based on markdown and CSS, viewable in the terminal, one could `grep` and `sed` and `git diff` through it, LLMs could read and write it natively, ... But I'm afraid it'll take another 40 years until we're there.

RTF exists.

All I see in this article is bunch of ads and something about people arguing on Twitter. Is there a link to the actual project or announcement?

https://github.com/storytold/wordcraft

https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft

Thank you kindly!

…isn’t this the same person who submitted Adobe clones to HN last week and then the thread was deleted by the mods?

Internet decentralized the data. Now, AI has decentralized software. Next, we need decentralized AI.

How is AI currently not decentralized?

A very small group of companies have the infrastructure required to train and serve a frontier model. They have a stranglehold on the compute/resources required for a new participant to break in.

And an overwhelming majority of enterprises running AI in production do so via one of two providers.

We'll like have an open-weight opus 5.5 class model we can run on (fancy) local hardware in a year or two at full perf, especially with AI optimized M7 macs. That's pretty distributed IMO.

Which brings us to the other decentralization issue we're running into: a 16GB stick of RAM might be $1500 by then.

The Chinese is still in control of it. If the Chinese gov decides no more open weight and stop financing those AI labs, rip your "AI distribution"

How is it decentralized?

Better start with decentralizing smartphones and their apps...

Can these tools withstand Microsoft’s lawyers?

Hey can't withstand even basic usage.

It should be doable to vibe code all Microsoft Office apps by using Apache OpenOffice as input. The Artcraft team seems to have successfully been able to vibe code all of Adobe's creative suite https://getartcraft.com

I’d be thoroughly impressed if all the weird quirks of Excel also make the cut.

Genuinely curious: what weird quirks have you encountered in Excel? Back 10 years ago when I was using Excel daily I didn’t think anything was weird about it (it was actually my favorite tool)

I’m not hating on Excel, it’s a formidable tool. I’ve had some less fun with dates and times in the past and called it quits.

There are plenty of stories, some of them:

Pasting old dates: https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2015/aug/excel-d...

Low row limit: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/excel-specificatio...

Conversions: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4994289/

On mobile so cannot test but does this include power query?

Never mind, just checked it out... it has absolutely nothing. I guess this is nice for people who work with excel as a fancy digital scrap paper, for which indeed many alternatives already exist.

They'll call it AI, but they won't call it bad.

I'm very pro-AI and think it's a massive leap forward for software development.

However these apps are really bad. Basically nonfunctional PoCs made to generate a hype wave.

The major problem with replacing Office is the file formats used by Word, Excel, etc. I highly doubt these applications handle them.

There's no need for GUI based apps linke these anymore: RevealJS, Typst, Grist. They are CI&CD native and give you infinite reproducibility.

We are really speed running destroying the software market, the long term effects won’t be nice. There is a reason FLOSS isn’t about cloning 1-1 existing applications. That’s something we could always have done if we really wanted. What we will end up with will be corporations pushing everything to the cloud, pushing for even stricter copyright/trademark protections to fight against that type of clones, stricter controls over software distribution.

Instead of using the power of LLMs to create genuine new products we instead get clone factories just to avoid paying or switch to an alternative. What a really dumb future we are building here, where trying to create novel software is a risk because any 14yo with a Claude subscription will clone it, distribute it for free. At least with keygen someone had to be pretty skillful and the distribution was niche…

This is AI generated and it's impressive too, https://www.os8088.com/

but if you have an old PC with Frotz to play with, create some game by hand (no AI used, at all) with Inform6 or better, Puny Inform and try doing things by yourself. You will be surprised of what you can do with very little...

Awesome. Now do one for TurboTax!

I find demands like that equally funny like the ones wishing for Autodesk alternatives.

I would not trust slopcoded tax software and I would not trust slopcoded CAD tools in any way.

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