Microsoft Office Online Integration

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Let's talk about collaboration, getting work done in teams locally or remote, even across time zones and vast distances.

Building value by working together in the cloud. You may have already seen how the Files.com platform enables and promotes collaboration by making files easy to share by giving your administrators sensible permissions models and tools and through solid security features that give you peace of mind while working with your important information assets.

In this COVID and post COVID world, collaboration across time and distance has become even more vital to success. That's why Files.com wants to help you take collaboration even further with our Microsoft Office for Web Integration. Let's start with what you need in order to turn this integration on for your site. First, you need to have a Business or Student Microsoft Office 365 subscription.

Next, you or one of your Site Administrators would need to enable the integration in your Site Settings. We'll just navigate to settings here, choose integrations. Scroll all the way to the bottom until you see office 365. And make sure this is toggled on. If it's off, the integration does not work. So make sure that it's toggled on. It's also important to note that Microsoft limits the file sizes that you can work with when using Office for web.

If you are working with spreadsheets using Excel, then you are limited to a file size of five megabytes, both for viewing and for editing. If you're working on presentations using PowerPoint, then there's no size limit for the files that you can view. But downloads are subject to a 60 second timeout, and editing is limited to 300 megabytes.

If you're working with word processing documents in Word, then there's also no file size limit for viewing. But again, file downloads are subject to a 60 second timeout. And editing is limited to 100 megabytes.

Now that we have the integration enabled, let's open a document and see what this looks like.

You have two choices for how to do this. One way to do it is you can click right on a document and open a preview. And you'll see that down here, I can choose Should I preview this in files, calm native mode or an office. And I've got Office selected by default, because this is a docx. And I also have the option here to open this in Microsoft Office Online.

Or the quick way to do this is go straight to the ellipsis menu here and choose open an office. And one thing to note if you have a non Microsoft document, you'll see in the ellipsis menu that that option doesn't exist, you don't have the ability to open, for instance, this plain text document as a office for web documents session.

So let's go back to this docx here. And we're going to choose the ellipsis menu and we're going to say open in Microsoft Office Online. With either method that you choose your document opens in a new browser tab. Here's our list of files. And here we are with a new browser tab. And here's our document, you can see if you're familiar with Microsoft Office products that you've got familiar interface for you to work with.

In fact, if I open up the same document using the desktop application, which is what is here, we can see that these menus are very similar. So if you're used to working with these programs, working with the Office Online for Web Version is going to be very familiar to you.

Now let's take a look at real time collaboration. Let's say some coworkers and I are working on a presentation. I'm just going to open up this PowerPoint file here. And you can see I'm in Preview Mode I'm going to use the open in Microsoft Office Online button down here, which is a little different from how we open the document the first time and so now you can see that PowerPoint is opened in this tab.

So now we've got this open and I can see that two of my colleagues are already in this presentation. I can see if I mouse over this, I can see Matt is working on the second slide. If I mouse over this screen, when I can see Justin is working on the third slide. And so this gives you the opportunity to not only see the changes that they're making in real time.

I see we've got a new polar bear. And we also have Chewbacca here.

But you can also see who's on which slide, so you can avoid stepping on each other's edits. So while we're at it, why don't I go ahead and get a different otter, you can see I'm gonna bring up this Desktop App. Again, I'm going to copy this just like you would do in any typical Microsoft Office document, I'm going to get rid of this otter and I'm going to put this other one in.

Alright, so you can see the tools that you're used to using on the desktop version are very similar to those that you're going to use in the Office for Web versions. Okay, so we've got this change here, I can see that Matt has brought us in penguins on the second slide. And we are back to Chewbacca on the third slide. Excellent. So you can see that real time collaboration is very easy.

let's go back and look at another example. I'm going to close this preview. And we also have this spreadsheet here. So I'm going to open this spreadsheet instead of going for the preview, I'm going to go straight to the ellipsis menu. And now I'm going to choose Open in Microsoft Office Online. And just like we saw previously, this opens in a new browser tab. And here we are, this is a spreadsheet and I can go through here I see totals for john, so I'm going to change my totals here.

Same way you would do on the desktop version, you can see the totals working. But if I happen to have colleagues also collaborating on this document, and these people can be all over the globe in any timezone anywhere. They just happen to be logged in to my Files.com Site and they have this document open. You can see from the cursors here, here's Justin. Here's Matt, and you can see the cursor is moving around. So the color code always allows you to see very easily who's where and what they're doing.

So I can avoid making changes to the same cell they're making changes to while seeing their changes in real time. And of course, even if you're not working on a document that you're collaborating on, you should still use this integration.

If you're the only one in a document, you don't have to worry about saving. You don't have to upload the file after your work is done because it's already where it needs to be safe and secure. You can access your work from any modern web browser and those around the world who need to use that brilliant spreadsheet or that great document that you just put together already know where to find it.

I hope you found this video informative and useful. Thank you for watching our video series. If you would like to contact us to learn more please don't hesitate. You can reach us by email at support at Files.com or using our 800 number at 1-800-286-8372. Or if you happen to be logged into your Files.com Site as an administrator, you can click on your Username in the upper right corner and use this Contact Support Form to generate a ticket.