Bureau opens your documents, workbooks, decks and plain text in the browser, and lets your team edit them there too. Both the viewing and the editing happen on the page you already have open (nothing is uploaded to Microsoft or Google, and an appliance with no route out to the internet behaves exactly the same), and what saves back is the file you opened rather than a converted copy of it.
Bolting someone else’s office suite onto a file platform is the normal way to do this, and it means every document your team opens takes a trip through a third party before it comes back. We wanted the file to stay put, so we built the viewers and the editors ourselves and put them where the file already is.
Bureau edits the original rather than importing it into a house format and exporting a fresh file at the end. The parts nobody touched come back exactly as they went in, so the numbering, the styles and that one fiddly table survive the trip through the browser.
The engines that draw a document, a workbook or a deck are part of Foldr and run in the browser, reading the file straight from the storage it already sits in. On a self-hosted appliance with no route out to the internet, Bureau works exactly as it does on our hosted service.
Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint decks, and text files including Markdown (with the rendered page beside the source). Each format has a viewer everyone gets, and an editor your IT team can switch on format by format.
Turn tracking on and every insertion and deletion is attributed and coloured by author. They save back as real Word revisions, so whoever opens the file next in Word sees tracked changes and can accept or reject them there, exactly as if a colleague had marked it up on the desktop.
Decks open with a filmstrip and a full-screen Present mode that plays the deck’s own transitions (fades, wipes, pushes and the rest of the common set), so the Monday review doesn’t depend on someone having the right copy on their laptop.
Co-editing is a switch per format: two colleagues open the same workbook and watch each other’s cells land live. On Word documents someone in desktop Word can join the same session, editing alongside whoever is in the browser.
Four families, and the same shape every time: a viewer anyone with access to the file gets, and an editor on top of it. If a file has something in it Bureau can’t draw, it hands over to whichever external viewer your IT team has configured rather than showing your team a broken page.
Pages, headers, footnotes, tables, images and comments, drawn as a real page rather than an approximation of one. The editor writes tracked insertions and deletions back as Word revisions.
Multiple sheets, charts, images, number formats and frozen panes. Edit cells and formulas, add and rename sheets, 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 nothing ever shows you a number it made up.
Shapes, text boxes, tables, charts and images, positioned where the deck says they go. Edit the text, move and resize shapes, reorder and duplicate slides, then run it full-screen with the deck’s own transitions.
Log files, config, JSON, XML and Markdown (.txt, .md, .json, .xml and friends) open with syntax colouring instead of as a wall of monospace. Markdown gets the rendered page alongside the source, so the person writing the handover notes can see what they’ll look like. Text files save back exactly as typed, right down to the line endings.
It’s the last Tuesday of the month and the regional budget is open in front of four people at once. Nobody is emailing v7-FINAL-really.xlsx around, because everyone is in the same file: cells land as they’re typed, each person gets their own colour, and the file saves back to the same share it was always in.
Turn co-editing on per format and per share, so the finance team can share a workbook without the whole organisation’s documents suddenly becoming collaborative. Everyone sees who else is in the file, and where they are in it.
Word documents go one step further: someone working in desktop Word can be in the same co-authoring session as the people in the browser (the same protocol Word uses against SharePoint, pointed at your own storage instead). The person on the train with Word open and the person on a Chromebook are editing the same file.
The viewers are finished work and on by default. The editors are labelled beta in the product, and that isn’t a legal disclaimer we’ve stapled on: they’re young, and there are documents with enough going on in them that some advanced formatting won’t survive a save. We’d rather say that here than have you find out on a document that mattered.
A few specifics, so you can judge it properly. Slide animations and object timings are preserved in the file but aren’t played back, so a deck built around motion is still a deck you should present from PowerPoint. Spreadsheet formulas outside the set Bureau recalculates keep Excel’s cached answer until Excel next opens the file. Whilst someone has a file open in the browser editor, everyone else gets it read-only, which is deliberate: it’s a lock rather than a merge, unless co-editing is switched on for that format.
Everything Bureau can’t draw falls back to whichever external viewer your IT team has configured, and the desktop apps keep working the way they always have. Bureau is an addition to how your team opens files, not a replacement for the ways that already suit them. Tell us what breaks and it tends to get fixed.
Search has already read the file, so a colleague can find it by a phrase inside it and open it in Bureau from the results. Sign takes the finished document out for signature. Grace answers questions about a folder full of them. Governance decides who had to approve it before anyone else saw it.
Try it free for 30 days, no credit card. Or get in touch about self-hosting.
