Everything to do with Foldr Bureau sits on one page: Foldr Settings > Integrations > Foldr Bureau. There are four tabs across it, one per kind of file.
| Tab | Covers |
|---|---|
| Documents | Word documents |
| Spreadsheets | Excel workbooks |
| Presentations | PowerPoint decks |
| Text | Plain text, code, configuration and Markdown |
Each tab has the same two switches, plus one extra on the Text tab.
Viewer
Turning Viewer on means that kind of file renders in the browser when somebody opens it, rather than being handed to an external viewer or downloaded.
The viewers are read-only and are the finished part of Bureau, so there’s no real reason to hold them back. If a particular file turns out to have something in it Bureau can’t draw, Foldr quietly falls back to whichever external viewer you’ve configured, so the worst case is the behaviour you had before.
Editor (Beta)
Turning Editor (Beta) on adds an Edit button to the viewer for that kind of file. Anyone who can already change the file can then change it in the browser.
The label is honest. A document with a lot going on in it can lose some advanced formatting when it’s saved from the browser, so the editors are worth introducing deliberately rather than switching all four on at five to five on a Friday.
Two things to know before you flip one:
- The switch applies to everybody who can see that kind of file. There’s no per-group version of it, so you pilot by format, not by team.
- Whilst one person has a file open in the browser editor, everyone else gets it read-only, including anyone in desktop Word. That’s a lock rather than a merge. If you’d rather several people worked in a file together, see co-editing documents in Foldr Bureau.
File types (Text tab only)
The Text tab has a File types box listing the extensions the text editor will open, one per line. Plain text, Markdown, JSON and XML are there out of the box, along with logs and common configuration formats.
Add anything else your teams work with. The viewer will colour it sensibly whether or not it’s on the list; the list is about what can be edited.
A sensible order to do this in
- Turn all four viewers on. Nobody can break anything with a viewer, and this is the change people notice and like: files just open.
- Leave it a week. Anything that renders badly will surface quickly, and you’ll have a sense of the file types your teams actually use.
- Turn on one editor. Documents is usually the right first choice because it’s the format people most want to fix a typo in without opening Word.
- Tell people what beta means. Point them at editing a document in the browser, which says it plainly and in a page.
- Add the others as you get comfortable.
What people see afterwards
Nothing moves and nothing needs reconfiguring at their end. The next time somebody opens a Word document, it appears in the browser instead of downloading, and if the editor for that format is on, there’s an Edit button on it.
Desktop Office is untouched by any of this. Foldr Drive still saves back to the same share, and anyone who prefers Word can carry on in Word.