Click a Word document, an Excel workbook, a PowerPoint deck or a text file in Foldr and it opens in front of you, rendered as a page rather than downloaded. That’s Foldr Bureau, and if your administrator has switched the editors on, you can change the file there too.
Nothing you do here goes to Microsoft or Google. The file is read from, and written back to, the storage it was already sitting on.
Making a change
Open the file, then look for the Edit button with a pen on it, at the top of the document. Click it and the viewer becomes an editor.
When you’re done, save. The file is written back to the same place it came from, under the same name, and anyone else looking at that folder sees the new version. There’s no separate download, no “upload the changed copy” step, and no second copy left lying about.
If you’d rather work in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, nothing has changed: carry on as you always have. Bureau is there for the times when opening an application isn’t worth it, or when you’re on a machine that hasn’t got one.
Tracked changes in a document
Word documents have a Track control in the editor. Turn it on and everything you type is marked as an insertion, everything you delete is marked as a deletion, and both are labelled with your name and given a colour of their own.
These are real Word revisions. The next person to open the file in desktop Word sees tracked changes exactly as they’d expect, and can accept or reject them there. You aren’t creating something only Foldr understands.
Presenting a deck
Presentations open with a strip of slide thumbnails down the side. There’s a Present control for full-screen, and the deck plays its own transitions as you move through it, so you can present from a browser without hunting for the right copy of the file.
Animations inside a slide are a different thing, and Bureau doesn’t play those. They’re kept safely in the file, but a deck built around them is still one to present from PowerPoint.
Markdown and text files
Text, code and configuration files open with syntax colouring. Markdown gets its formatted page alongside the source you’re typing, so you can see how it’ll read as you write it.
Text files save back exactly as you typed them, down to the line endings, which matters more than it sounds like it should if you’re editing configuration.
Why is this file read-only?
Usually because somebody else is in it. Bureau lets one person edit a file at a time unless your administrator has switched on co-editing for that kind of file and for that share. When somebody else has it open, you can read it and you’ll get it when they’re finished.
Failing that, it may simply be that you have read access to the file rather than permission to change it, which Bureau doesn’t alter one way or the other. Or the editor for that kind of file may not be switched on for your Foldr, in which case you’ll see the file but no Edit button.
What’s still rough
The editors are beta, and we’d rather tell you than have you discover it on something important.
A document with a lot going on in it can lose some advanced formatting when you save it from the browser. Everyday documents are fine. Something heavily designed, full of unusual layout or built by somebody who really knows Word, is worth opening in Word.
In a spreadsheet, Bureau recalculates the functions it knows and keeps Excel’s own answer for the ones it doesn’t, so you’ll never see a number Foldr made up. If a workbook leans on unusual functions, treat the browser as a place to read it rather than rework it.
The viewers carry none of this. Reading a file in Foldr is safe whatever’s in it, and if Bureau meets something it can’t draw, it hands the file to another viewer rather than showing you a broken page.