Tiny Little Office puts the document inside its own link

Paul Ford’s company Aboard just put out Tiny Little Office, ten free office apps where the web address is the file. Copy the link, paste it into a chat, and Ford says everybody in that chat now has a copy they can edit, with no account for anyone.

Tiny Little Office’s own guide shows how it works with a dinner bill. Open the calculator, type what food and drinks cost, add an 18% tip, divide by six, and send the link to the table. Ford wrote in the Aboard newsletter on October 14 that the data rides in the link, after the “#,” which stays local by default, so nothing gets saved to a server and all your internet provider sees is that you visited the site.

Besides the calculator, the site lists a word processor, outliner, presentation builder, spreadsheet, drawing tool, diagram maker, animator, calendar and trip planner, and you can drop one document inside another. Ford calls that “the dream of the entire 1990s in office software,” and he’s right.

Ford’s co-founder Rich Ziade had the idea six years ago with TinySheet, a ten-line spreadsheet that kept its data in its link, which Ford says people mostly used to share simple math in Slack. TinySheet and a later TinyCalendar “fell off the web, and the old links all broke.” This version is open source under the MIT license.

Ford is upfront that it’s built for “a couple pages, a few slides.” You can’t upload images or video, and it isn’t collaborative the way Google Docs is. A long document can go through the site’s link shortener, which encrypts it in your browser before sending it to a server, though Ford says those links expire within a month.

I’d use it for the small stuff you’d otherwise screenshot from a notes app, like a packing list, a recipe or the split on a dinner bill, and if you’ll still want it next year, export it as a PDF or keep the full link somewhere safe.

The link is the file.