Apologies if this has been posted here before (rule 4), but my search turned out empty, hence I felt it was okay to ask.
TL;DR: As the title suggests, I am looking for recommendations for software for real time collaboration in a spreadsheet-like manner. I myself would prefer Proton Sheets (I already have a paid plan), but I wanted to hear people’s experiences with it, and what alternatives there are.
Some people/strangers and I, in my neighbourhood, have come together to start a volunteering group for building a workshop that the community can make use of. In relation to this, we need a simple way to track different things, tasks, and who’s doing what and when. Think of inventory, shifts, etc. The group mentioned they would be happy with Google Sheets, but as someone who left the Google ecosystem years ago, I am not keen on going back, and would really like a great alternative that is as easy to use.
The group is a healthy mix of young technically competent people, professional carpenters, and older people not so great at using computers, thus it is important that its easy to sign up and use.
I realise the solution does not need to be a spreadsheet-like service, but that was something the group seemed to agree to be easy enough to use. I would be grateful if anyone here had a better solution though.
Perhaps I just need to suck it up, and create a new Google email for only this, but since we will not be using any enterprise plan or similar, my guess is that our data will be fed to an LLM for training. It also involves my private life, so I would really like to avoid this.
Not trying to be a downer, but I’ve worked the trenches of an internal IT help desk for a company, and you should prepare yourself for doing free volunteer tech support if you set something up like this. You’d be shocked at what things can be road blocks to otherwise intelligent, seemingly technical people. The risk of it drops if you use something more standard like Google Sheets, but it doesn’t disappear entirely.
You will probably need to go with something that works for the lowest common denominator of your group. That might be “horrible messy email thread manually turned into a shared Apple or Google calendar once a week by a volunteer”. If you don’t, there will be constant friction with them. I’ve seen similar collaboration efforts fail on a team of professional systems engineers simply due to a difference in how each person wanted to take and maintain their notes. No one could settle on a standard and eventually the person pushing for it gave up.
In short there are multiple angles to this, more than simply privacy vs ease of use.
That said, nextcloud appears to be the current standard for this outside of Google and Microsoft.