Apps from Excelano
Umwandler
Office files to OpenDocument, as they open.
Double-clicking a .docx, .xlsx or .pptx produces an .odt, .ods or .odp and opens the result in the editor already on the workstation. For the person at the desk, nothing about the routine changes.
The step that makes the move possible
Moving to OpenDocument as the house format and moving off Microsoft Office are two different projects. The first is a decision about formats, retention and sovereignty; the second is replacing software on thousands of desks, with training, macros, templates and resistance. Tie them together and you get the pace of the slower one.
Umwandler addresses the first and leaves the second open. It converts on open, so it works where Microsoft Office is still in use: Office has written ODF for years, and where LibreOffice is present that is used instead. No additional conversion engine has to be procured.
This is the direction the Deutschland-Stack and the sovereign-workplace work set: open, documented formats whose readability does not depend on one vendor. Umwandler is not the program that makes that decision — it is the piece that makes it practicable across an existing estate.
What happens on a double-click
The location first
On a local drive the configured handling applies in full. From an e-mail attachment the result is written to a permanent folder, because editing it where it sits would lose the work. In a synchronised folder the original is always kept, because deleting it would propagate to everyone else in the library.
Then the conversion
The file is converted by the program that will open it. The same program then writes and reads it, and the first save shifts no layout.
Then the check
Whether a conversion succeeded is decided by the result, not by what the program reported: some failures end with a success code and an unusable file. The produced file itself is checked.
And an open document at the end
If every configured route fails, the original is opened and the operation logged. There is always an open, editable document at the end. That is not a setting; it is what the application undertakes to do.
For IT
Deploys silently
An MSIX package, distributed through Intune or a comparable tool. With no policy assigned Umwandler stays dormant: nothing is converted and nothing deleted. A fresh installation does not change how a workstation behaves.
Controlled entirely by policy
ADMX and ADML templates in German and English are included. Every setting is IT-locked by default, and each can be individually released for the signed-in person to change. What is locked is shown with a note rather than hidden.
Accountable
A JSON Lines log, one line per operation, which a central collector reads without further setup. Optionally without personal reference.
No network
No telemetry, no usage counting, no outbound call. Conversion happens on the workstation. Network conversion services were considered and rejected for exactly that reason.
The log and co-determination
A full log records which documents a named person opened. Under German staff-representation law that is a record of conduct and performance, and it is ordinarily subject to co-determination. We say so plainly, because it is a matter to settle with the works council before deployment rather than after.
For that case there is an anonymised scope: it omits paths and account names and keeps file type, location, engine, duration and outcome. That still answers whether conversion is working across the estate without recording anything about an individual.
Open source, checkable, yours
The source is on openCode, the German public administration's own platform, under EUPL-1.2. Every claim on this page can be checked there, and the licence expressly permits building the package yourself and signing it with your own authority's certificate.
The application takes no third-party packages. For a review board, that is the shorter list.