OnlyOffice / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETOnlyOffice Desktop Editors might not be on your radar. You might assume there are only three major players in the office suite space: Office 365, Google Docs, and LibreOffice. However, there is another tool that I find to be as good (and even better in some ways) as the competition. That tool is OnlyOffice.Also: This city is dumping Microsoft Office and Windows for OnlyOffice and Linux – here’s whyOnlyOffice has been around for a while but has mostly flown under the radar, which is a shame, because it’s an outstanding office suite option. One of my favorite aspects of the app is that it can be used locally, with a cloud instance of OnlyOffice, or both. I have, on several occasions, had one document open in the cloud and one opened locally — both at the same time in the same app. That alone makes OnlyOffice worth the price of entry (which, by the way, is free). What’s new in OnlyOffice version 9?Recently, the team behind OnlyOffice released version 9, and along with that comes an important new addition: AI. Before you get confused, OnlyOffice already had an AI plugin, which allowed you to connect to both local and remote LLMs. With the release of version 9, the OnlyOffice AI can now help you with: Extract text from scanned PDF files.Apply smart formulas in spreadsheets.Run complex data analysis in spreadsheets.Create OnlyOffice macros based on prompts.Convert VBA macros to OnlyOffice macros.For many, the most impressive feature will be the ability to create macros from a prompt. Macros are scripts that you would normally have to write by hand to do various things. For example, you could create a spreadsheet macro that generates a report with bar graphs for all columns that have numbers or one that surrounds formulas in selected cells by =IFERROR(,””):. Once you’ve created the macro, open your document, open the macro, and run it. Your report will then be generated and (hopefully) ready to use. Also: How to add an email account to your OnlyOffice deploymentTypically, writing macros requires an understanding of JavaScript, but with OnlyOffice 9, you can now create that macro using human-readable language via the new AI feature. This is a remarkable feature that should save spreadsheet fans tons of time. More