Privacy
Your file never leaves your computer. Here is how that works, and how to check it yourself rather than take my word for it.
Check it in ten seconds
- Open any tool on this site and wait for it to finish loading.
- Turn off your wifi, or unplug the network cable.
- Now drop your project file in.
It works exactly as before. Every calculation, every table and every download still happens. A page that is not connected to anything cannot send your file anywhere, so this is not a promise you are being asked to believe. It is something you can watch.
What actually happens when you drop a file in
Your browser can read a file you choose without sending it anywhere. That is a normal thing browsers do, and it is the whole basis of this site. When you pick a spreadsheet, the code that reads it is already sitting in the page, having arrived when the page loaded. It opens the file, does the arithmetic, and writes the answer onto the screen. Nothing is transmitted at any point in that sequence.
When you download a result, that file is assembled in the page too and handed to your browser directly. It is never built on a server, because there is no server involved once the page has loaded.
Closing the page clears it
Your file and every result worked out from it live only in the open page. Nothing is saved to your browser’s storage and no cookies are set, so refreshing the page, closing the tab or navigating away clears it all. Come back tomorrow and the tool starts empty.
What a download contains
Spreadsheets come out as CSV, which is plain text: it cannot carry hidden sheets, formulas, comments or document properties, so what you see when you open one is everything in it. A tool that ever offers another format will say so where it does.
What this site does not have
- No accounts, no sign-in, no password to forget.
- No database. There is nowhere for your data to be stored.
- No file uploads. Not a temporary one, not a cached one, not one that is deleted afterwards. There is no upload.
- No analytics of any kind. Nothing records which tools you open, what your files are called or anything inside them.
- No advertising, no trackers following you to other sites, and nothing sold to anybody.
The browser holds the site to it
“No code here sends your file anywhere” is a claim about code. So every page also tells your browser, in its security policy, to refuse any connection to any other website and any form that posts somewhere else. If a script on one of these pages ever tried to send something away, your browser would block it before it left. You can see the policy in your browser’s developer tools, under the page’s response headers, as Content-Security-Policy.
The honest limits
The page itself is served from a web host, the way every website is. That host can see that somebody requested a page, in the same way it would for any site you visit. It cannot see your file, because your file is never sent to it.
Your own computer is still your own computer. If you download a result, that file is now on your machine and subject to whatever rules apply there. If you are working with a commercially sensitive schedule or budget, the usual care applies: where you save it and who you send it to.
Nothing on this site is legal, financial or contractual advice. The tools do arithmetic and show their working. Deciding what to do with the answer is your job, and several of the tools say so on their own pages at some length.
If you want to be certain
Do the wifi test. It is more convincing than anything written on this page, including this sentence, because it does not require you to trust the person who wrote it.
Questions about any of this are welcome at hello@thepmtoolbox.com. Please describe a problem rather than attaching a file. See the about page for who built this and why.