Workspace
Free, no account, and nothing is uploaded. Every one of them autosaves to your browser and exports to a real file you keep.
Eleven applications
The Workspace at work
Recorded in the applications themselves, in one take, in an ordinary browser.
What each one does
Ten applications that open the files the office programs make and write them back, in the browser tab, and Today, which reads them all. They cost nothing, at work included, and there is no account to make.
Docs
Pages under a ruler, with styles, tables, footnotes, comments and tracked changes. Opens and saves Word .docx, and saves a web page, Markdown, plain text or, through the print dialogue, PDF.
Sheets
Formulas that recalculate as you type, with 182 functions from XLOOKUP to IRR, results that spill as FILTER and SORT’s do in Excel, several sheets in a workbook, charts, sparklines and pivot tables. Opens and saves Excel .xlsx, and CSV.
Slides
Layouts and a slide master, pictures, shapes and tables, transitions and animations, speaker notes and a presenter view. Opens and saves PowerPoint .pptx.
Notes
Markdown notes in folders, with wikilinks, tags, backlinks and a graph of the links between them; in browsers that allow it, every note can be a .md file in a folder on your disk.
Calendar
Day, week, month, year and schedule views, repeating events, and .ics files in and out, so a calendar moves to and from Google, Outlook and Apple.
Tasks
Boards of lists and cards with labels, checklists, due dates and attachments. Imports a Trello board’s JSON; exports JSON, CSV and .ics.
Contacts
An address book that imports and exports vCard, CSV and JSON, and writes the CSV that Google and Outlook each expect.
Plan
A project plan with all four kinds of dependency, lead and lag, the critical path and a Gantt chart. Opens and saves project XML and CSV.
Turn, move, add and remove pages, fill in a form, write, highlight and sign on the page, and black out text so it is removed from the file, not covered.
Today
The day in one place, read from the others as it stands: today’s events, the cards due and overdue, the dates of the next fortnight and the documents you had open, each a click from its own application.
Drive
Folders for what you make in the others, with files moved by dragging, kept in this browser on this device, and a view of what the others keep in your folder.
What survives a trip through Word, Excel and PowerPoint
The file formats are the ones Microsoft Office uses, read and written here without a converter on a server.
| File | Comes in | Goes back out | Stays behind |
|---|---|---|---|
| Word .docx, in Docs | Text and its structure: headings, bold and italic, lists, tables, links, pictures, footnotes and comments | All of that, with fonts, colours, highlight, page size and margins, headers and footers with page numbers, tracked changes, columns and threaded comments | Fonts, colours and sizes set in the Word file are not read, so the text takes the document’s own styles; text boxes and complex layouts are simplified |
| Excel .xlsx, in Sheets | Every sheet, values, formulas, formats, merged cells, widths, frozen panes, colour rules, validation, notes, charts and pivot tables | The same, as Excel’s own parts | Macros; a formula Sheets cannot work out keeps the value Excel saved |
| PowerPoint .pptx, in Slides | Slides, text with its formatting, shapes, groups, tables, pictures, backgrounds, transitions and speaker notes | The same | Animations and comments stay in the browser’s copy; PowerPoint may lay text out a little differently |
Where your files live, and working offline
Each application keeps what you are working on in the browser’s own storage for this site, on this device, as you type, so a closed tab loses nothing. When you want a file, you export it, and it is an ordinary .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, .ics, .vcf or .md that any program opens. There is no copy anywhere else, which also means that clearing the browser’s data for this site clears what is kept in it: export what matters.
In Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers on a computer you can instead choose a folder once, and Docs, Sheets, Slides, Notes, Tasks, Contacts and Calendar work from it: each document is a .docx in it, each workbook an .xlsx, each presentation a .pptx, the calendar an .ics and the address book a .vcf, saved as you work and read again when you change one in another program. Clearing the browser’s data then loses nothing, because the folder brings it all back. Safari and Firefox cannot open a folder; in them, keep a backup file from Settings.
Install adds the Workspace to your computer or phone as an app with its own window, from the browser you already use. Installed, the ten applications are stored on the device and open with no connection at all.
Set against what you may use now
Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Acrobat, Trello and Microsoft Project, each with what comes across and what does not.