Introducing Proton Sheets
Proton Drive now includes Proton Sheets, giving you secure, encrypted spreadsheets for safer collaboration, organized data, and aligned teams.
Good luck.
If Excel ever gets replaced, then we know that we overcame Microsoft.
I'm actually pretty excited to have another product to try to motivate friends and family to leave Google behind. Maybe this will do it.
I’ve managed entirely on Google Sheets for years now. And I was a really big fan of Excel. It was never viable for me to rely on Windows to be everywhere I need to be, and the functionality gap closed steadily over the years to the point where the benefits of it being on the web now overwhelm the feature gap. Being free helps too, especially as Excel has gone through various pricing and bundling contortions over the years. Someone might tell me here that it’s now completely free but can I really be blamed for tuning out Microsoft years ago?
Nobody can blame anyone but MicroShit for dumping MicroShit.
Genuinely what do you need in excel you can’t do anywhere else? For me sheets are just glorified visual data storage. If I need to do complex stuff I can probably do it faster in polars or pandas than I can in excel
It's massive in business environments. It is the lingua franca of business analysis (both back of the napkin analysis, proof of concept and more complicated/involved projects).
It is most definitely not used merely as "glorified visual data storage".
There are probably a lot of programms that do aspects of Excel better. But the combined might you weild if you know how to use Excel is very powerful. I tried LibreOffice and OnlyOffice and the spreadsheet part of those office suites is the roughest one until today.
But my comment was more about how much of our economy probably runs on Excel. And I experienced how badly Excel and for example LibreOffice Calc plays together, it makes switching very hard. A complex .xlsx is far from being rendered and calculated correctly in LibreOffice.
Proton drive on Linux
proton isn’t your friend I keep seeing people recommend protonmail like it’s some kind of activist infrastructure and it’s starting to bug me remember in 2021 when they handed over a french climate activist’s IP to the cops? swiss court order, data went through europol, person got arrested. this was while their website was still implying they couldn’t log you. they quietly changed the wording after they got caught and like… switzerland isn’t what people think it is. they have treaties with the US and EU, they share intelligence, their whole “neutrality” thing has always been about protecting money, not people. ask any dictator who parked their cash there also proton took VC money. it’s not a co-op, it’s not worker owned, it’s a company that sells privacy as a product. which means eventually the investors are going to want their returns and something’s gotta give none of this means “don’t use it” - it’s still better than google. but e2ee doesn’t hide metadata and metadata is often enough. your threat model matters. a corporation is not going to protect you from the state, ever
Nobody is your friend... but at least proton isnt logging your data and selling ads into your inbox.... that's good enough for me...
Check your threat model... 90% of people arent doing direct action that needs protection from nation states.... and proton isnt big enough to protect you from nation states. (pretty sure they tell you that they have to comply with legal, swiss laws)
Stop trying to scare people into going back to gmail.... there will always be flaws in proton/tuta/whatever mail service....
Go try running your own email if you truly need perfect privacy and anonymity
100% agree with your take.
Why scare people looking to ditch google with stupid stuff like "but they complied with the government", bruh google complies with anyone who has their wallet in-hand.
ProtonMail is a free inbox and is privacy friendly. Yes there are other options, but this isn't a bad one by any means.
a group called Youth for Climate was doing direct action in paris - occupying empty buildings near Place Sainte-Marthe to protest gentrification and airbnb bullshit. pretty standard stuff. they used a protonmail address to coordinate french cops wanted to know who was behind the email. proton is swiss so france couldnt just demand it. so they went thru europol, who asked swiss authorities, who then issued a court order to proton heres the part that matters: proton wasnt already logging this persons IP. the swiss court ordered them to start logging it. proton complied, collected the IP going forward, and handed it over. activist got arrested. charges were trespassing, theft, property damage protons response was basically “we had no choice, swiss law, we support activists but cant break the law for you.” they also quietly edited their website - it used to say “we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account.” now it doesnt say that the CEO said they didnt even know it was about climate activists when they got the order. which… okay? thats not really the defense you think it is my guy the takeaway: • proton can be legally compelled to start logging you specifically • swiss “privacy” folds when another country wants you bad enough • encrytpion doesnt protect metadata • if your doing anything that might piss off a state, use tor. proton even says this themselvs now
No email service can refuse to obey the law. None.
Proton is at least non-profit now.
I've been wanting a sheets alternative and I really do not like libre office. This is huge
There's also Collabora Office
Yes!! I remember submitting feedback about this being a must have feature ages ago. Excited to get it
With all these web based office suites popping up, I wonder if anybody needs these? It seems like a solution pushed onto us that nobody asked for. Everybody I know is still using MS Office or Libreoffice and everybody seems to agree that office on mobile devices sucks.
Real-time collaboration is fairly useful, you can have a videocall or meeting while discussing changes to a document and making them together
Fair point. We usually do that with screen sharing. But then only one person can edit.
Good news! Unfortunately I'm not sold on having to have a bridge to access their email using Thinderbird, so I'm not subscribing Proton Unlimited "suite". Also no working Linux client for Proton Drive (rclone's is unmaintained and not working).
It is technically impossible at the moment to keep your emails end-to-end encrypted and not have to use a bridge for your client of choice. It will only be possible if your client of choice partners with Proton to integrate them, or if a standard for e2e encrypted emails pops up and both Proton and your client adopt it.
Wait, you can't access it via IMAP?
Problem is the e2e encryption. The bridge basically decrypts your emails and makes them locally accessible.
Did proton fire Andy yet? Fucking Nazi bootlicker
Amazing! I don't even remember seeing this on their road map. Caught me completely by surprise
Does if have FILTER, array formulas, spill zones, MAP, data tables, query engines, SQL engine etc etc?
To compete with Word: Easy. To compete with Excel: Very, very difficult (pretty much only Google Sheets have managed).
It’s not competing with word, it’s competing with Google Sheets.
Google Sheets is competing with Excel. Proton Sheets is competing with Google Sheets. So Proton Sheets is competing with Excel.
I used Word as a comparative example to say that parts of the office/docs suite are easy to compete with (there’s only so may things a word processor can do), while others (like Google Sheets or Excel, whichever order you prefer) is incredibly difficult to compete with; a formatting error on import of a Word doc is acceptable. An unsupported formula ruins the entire thing.
They should have forked Onlyoffice, however I appreciate the effort to make their own from scratch.
well great, now they're just gonna sheet all over the place.
I used to think they would Excel.
You have my Word on that
i mean i still use proton + LibreOffice, sheets isn't a big deal for me.
I've been using open / FOSS versions on Android and desktop for a while. Save those files to Proton Drive. The proton sheets variant needs to compete with those. Initial advantage will be the ability to view docs or spreadsheets natively rather than needing to download. Something Proton has actively NOT done when so many others have found it easy enough.
Why don't they fork Onlyoffice for this?
that's what cryptpad.fr does
Because forking a buggy suite isn't always the best choice? If they have the ressources, and they do, making their own is best for everyone. More choices.
I haven't found any issues with it. The problem with making their own is that the MS Office file formats are purposefully poorly documented with the spec being over 6000 pages long and MS Office itself not adhering to it. It would be best to start with something where most of the work is done for them.
