The import and export of common office formats (.ods/.xlsx, .odt/.docx, .odp/.ppt) is taken for granted in many online office suites. However, in the case of CryptPad, implementing such functionality presents a number of challenges to preserve our privacy requirements. This has long held back adoption of our platform as it prevented users from migrating existing documents and/or integrating CryptPad in their workflows.

In this talk I will summarize our work on INTEROFFICE, a project realized by the CryptPad team in 2021 with funding from the EU's Next Generation Internet (NGI) DAPSI program. The core of this work consists of a new set of converters that use Web Assembly to perform conversions between file formats in the browser. This allows for CryptPad to be vastly more inter-operable while preserving end-to-end encryption (the server still has no access to the content being converted).

Speaking as the designer on the team, I will focus on the research we conducted with users and on the ways this new functionality is making its way into CryptPad's interface.