Foldr Bureau is the part of Foldr that opens documents. Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations, and plain text files including Markdown all render in the browser window, and with the editors switched on, people can change them there too.
The important bit is where all that happens. Bureau is built into Foldr and runs in the browser, reading the file straight from the storage it already sits on. Nothing is uploaded to Microsoft or Google on the way, and a Foldr appliance with no route out to the internet behaves exactly as the hosted service does. When a file is saved, Bureau writes back to the original rather than exporting a fresh copy of it, so the parts nobody edited come back exactly as they went in.
What Bureau opens
Documents
Word documents render as real pages, with headers, footers, footnotes, tables, images and comments where the document puts them. The editor handles text and formatting, and it can author tracked changes: turn tracking on and every insertion and deletion is attributed and coloured by author, then saved back as proper Word revisions. Whoever opens the file next in desktop Word sees tracked changes there and can accept or reject them as usual.
Spreadsheets
Excel workbooks open with their sheets, charts, images, number formats and frozen panes intact. The editor covers cell and formula editing, adding, renaming, hiding and deleting sheets, and find and replace across the used range.
Bureau recalculates the functions it knows and keeps Excel’s own cached answer for the ones it doesn’t, so a cell never shows you a number Foldr invented. If you’re relying on a function Bureau can’t yet calculate, the value you see is the one Excel last worked out.
Presentations
PowerPoint decks render with their shapes, text boxes, tables, charts and images positioned where the deck says they go. There’s a filmstrip down the side and a full-screen Present mode that plays the deck’s own slide transitions, so you can run a review meeting from the browser without anyone hunting for the right copy.
The editor covers text, moving and resizing shapes, and reordering, duplicating and deleting slides.
Text and Markdown
Plain text, code and configuration files open with syntax colouring rather than as a wall of monospace. Markdown gets its rendered page alongside the source, which is handy for anyone writing handover notes who wants to see what they’ll look like. Text files save back exactly as typed, right down to the line endings.
Your administrator decides which extensions are editable, so the list can be widened if your teams work with something unusual.
Viewers and editors are separate
Each of the four formats has two switches behind it, and they’re deliberately independent.
The viewer is finished work and is the part most people use. It’s read-only and safe to leave on for everyone.
The editor is labelled beta, both in Foldr Settings and here. Your administrator turns editors on format by format, so it’s perfectly reasonable to run with all four viewers and only one editor while you get comfortable with it.
What “beta” actually means
We’d rather set this out plainly than have you find it on a document that mattered.
- A document with a lot going on in it can lose some advanced formatting when it’s saved from the browser editor. The everyday things are fine; the unusual ones may not survive.
- Slide animations and object timings are kept in the file but aren’t played back, so a deck built around motion is still a deck to present from PowerPoint.
- Spreadsheet formulas outside the set Bureau recalculates hold Excel’s cached answer until Excel next opens the file.
- Whilst somebody has a file open in the browser editor, everyone else gets it read-only. That’s a deliberate lock rather than a merge, unless co-editing is switched on for that format. See co-editing documents in Foldr Bureau.
The viewers carry none of these caveats. They’re just viewers.
When Bureau can’t render a file
Occasionally a file has something in it Bureau can’t draw. Rather than showing a broken page, Foldr hands over to whichever external viewer your administrator has configured, so the file still opens. Nobody has to know why.
How this sits with desktop Office
Bureau is an addition, not a replacement. The desktop applications carry on working exactly as they did, and Foldr Drive still saves straight back to the same share, so anyone doing heavy authoring can keep using Word.
Where Bureau earns its keep is the gap: people without a desktop Office licence, people on a borrowed or managed device, and quick changes that don’t justify opening an application at all.
Licensing and permissions
Bureau isn’t a licensed add-on and there’s no separate tier for it. It’s controlled entirely by the switches in Foldr Settings, on both the Foldr appliance and Foldr SaaS.
Admin setup
See enabling Foldr Bureau for the switches themselves, and co-editing documents in Foldr Bureau for letting several people into the same file at once.
If you’re a user rather than an administrator, editing a document in the browser is the one to read.