A free alternative to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides that needs no account

The Workspace is a set of office applications that run entirely in your browser tab: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Notes, Tasks, Calendar, Forms, Contacts and Drive. There is no account, nothing is uploaded, and the pages work with the network switched off once they have loaded. Your work is kept in the browser on this device, or, if you choose a folder on the front page, written as ordinary files into that folder on your own disk. What it does not do is let two people edit one document at once, or sync between your devices, because both need a server holding your files and there is none.

Docs

A word processor with the things a document needs: headings and paragraph styles, bold, italic, underline, colour and highlight, alignment and line spacing, bulleted, numbered and checklist lists, tables, links, pictures, a horizontal rule, the date, and find and replace. An outline of the headings sits beside the page, a ruler along the top, and a word count and reading time at the bottom. Four templates get a letter, a report, minutes or a plain page started.

It opens a Word file (.docx) chosen from your disk, in the tab, and writes one back with headings, lists, tables, links and pictures intact. It also writes PDF, Markdown and a standalone HTML page. Word features that have no equivalent here, such as tracked changes, comments and footnotes, are not carried across, and the page says so rather than dropping them silently.

Sheets

A spreadsheet with cells, ranges and formulas: SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, MIN, MAX, MEDIAN, STDEV, ROUND and its family, IF-style SUMIF, COUNTIF and AVERAGEIF, text functions (LEFT, RIGHT, MID, LEN, UPPER, LOWER, TRIM, CONCAT), logic (AND, OR, NOT, XOR), TODAY and NOW, about fifty in all. Cells format as currency, percent or plain numbers, align, and take bold and italic. Rows and columns insert and delete. A range you select shows its sum, average and count in the status bar.

It opens and writes Excel's .xlsx: every sheet in the workbook becomes a tab, with its values, the formulas the engine knows, bold, italic, alignment, and money, percentage and date formats; a formula it does not know keeps the value Excel saved. A spreadsheet can have several sheets, with tabs along the bottom. It imports and exports CSV and TSV as well. A block of cells becomes a bar, line or pie chart, drawn in the tab and kept with the sheet, and saved as PNG; a chart does not go into an Excel file. There are no pivot tables, and a formula cannot yet refer to another sheet.

Slides

Six layouts (a title, title and bullets, two columns, a big number, a quotation, a section break), five themes, pictures, speaker notes, and a full-screen presentation driven by the arrow keys. It exports the deck as one HTML file that plays in any browser with nothing installed, and prints to PDF with one slide a page. It does not write PowerPoint files; a deck for somebody who needs .pptx goes over as PDF.

The rest of the suite

Notes is a markdown notebook with links between notes, backlinks, tags and a graph, and it reads and writes a folder of .md files on your disk. Tasks is a to do, doing, done board with due dates and tags, exported as JSON or CSV. Calendar has month, week and day views and imports and exports .ics, the format every invitation actually is. Forms builds a questionnaire you fill in on the same device and exports the answers as CSV. Contacts reads and writes vCard. Drive keeps files in the browser and shows everything the other apps have made in one place, with a backup of the lot as one file.

Where the files are

By default, in the browser's storage on this device. That is private and it is not a backup: clearing the site's data deletes it, and another browser or another machine sees nothing. The better arrangement, on a desktop in Chrome or Edge, is to choose a folder once on the front page. From then on every app writes its work as ordinary files into that folder (a Docs document as .docx, a sheet as .csv, a deck as .html, a note as .md), and anything you already keep in it can be opened. The folder can be one that another program syncs, if you want your files on two machines; the site never touches a server for it.

What is not there

• Working together. Two people cannot edit one document at the same time. There is no sharing link and no comments. Send the file.
• Sync. Nothing moves between your devices unless you move it, or point the folder at something that does.
• Tracked changes, footnotes, comments in Docs, and a Word file that relies on them loses them on the way in.
• Pivot tables, formulas across sheets, and charts inside an .xlsx in Sheets.
• PowerPoint files in Slides, either way.
• Add-ons, scripts and a marketplace.
• A phone app. The pages work on a phone in the browser, and can be installed to the home screen, but the folder on disk is a desktop feature.

If your work is a shared document that six people comment on, this is not it and it does not pretend to be. If your work is writing a letter, keeping a budget, building a deck and owning the files afterwards, the table is the short version.