Foldr Bureau is the part of Foldr that opens documents. Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations, their OpenDocument equivalents (.odt, .ods and .odp), CSV files, 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 (.docx) and OpenDocument text files (.odt) render as real pages, with headers, footers, footnotes, tables, images and comments where the document puts them. Equations, SmartArt, embedded charts and Windows metafile pictures (WMF and EMF) are drawn too. Fonts embedded in a document are used, and your administrator can upload your organisation’s own fonts.
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 (or as OpenDocument tracked changes in an .odt). Whoever opens the file next in desktop Word sees tracked changes there and can accept or reject them as usual. There are review and comment panes, a navigator for moving around long documents, and print and save to PDF.
Type ”@” in a document to insert a chip for a person, a file, a field value or a date. Redaction is a separate mode: mark the words to remove, apply, and Bureau checks that they have gone from the saved file.
Save as converts between .docx and .odt in either direction. The conversion leaves out images, footnotes and comments for now, so check the result before relying on it.
Spreadsheets
Excel workbooks (.xlsx and .xlsm), OpenDocument spreadsheets (.ods) and CSV files open with their sheets, charts, images, number formats and frozen panes intact. A CSV opens in the spreadsheet grid when the Spreadsheets viewer is on, and as a text file otherwise. It saves back in the same dialect it arrived in (separator, line endings and encoding).
The editor covers cell and formula editing, adding, renaming, hiding and deleting sheets, and find and replace across the workbook, including regular expressions. It also includes:
- Charts: create one, change its series, titles, legend and type, and drag or resize it.
- Pivot tables: create one, arrange its fields, refresh it, filter it, group by date or number, and show values as a percentage or running total.
- AutoSum (the Σ button or Alt+=), and building a formula by clicking cells, with F4 to anchor a reference.
- The newer Excel functions whose results spill into neighbouring cells: FILTER, UNIQUE, SORT, SORTBY, SEQUENCE, XLOOKUP, XMATCH and LET.
- Conditional formatting, dropdown lists and named ranges.
- Excel tables with banded rows, a totals row and calculated columns.
- Sorting on several columns, filtering by condition, the fill handle, merged cells, borders, notes, paste special and text to columns.
- Grouping rows and columns, freezing and splitting panes, and sheet protection.
- Printing and saving as PDF.
Three worksheet functions read from Foldr itself. =FOLDR.FIELD("Invoice number") returns a custom field from this file (or another file, by path). =FOLDR.SEARCH("supplier:acme") lists the files matching a search, with a header row. =FOLDR.LOOKUP("data/prices.xlsx", "Sheet1!A1:B10") reads cells from another workbook.
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 (.pptx) and OpenDocument presentations (.odp) render with their shapes, text boxes, tables, charts, images and video positioned where the deck says they go. Slide shows saved as .ppsx open in the viewer. There’s a filmstrip down the side and a full-screen Present mode that plays the deck’s own transitions and animations, 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. You can also add animations, insert and edit charts and tables, crop and replace pictures, use gradient fills, group and ungroup shapes, align and distribute a selection, move a slide onto another layout, and find and replace across the deck. Video, speaker notes, comments and printing are supported.
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.
Other files
The viewer also opens PDFs (with find), TIFF images and OpenDocument templates (.ots and .otp). These are read-only.
Legacy Office files (.doc, .xls and .ppt) are not opened by Bureau. Open those in the desktop applications.
In every editor
- Ctrl+K opens a command palette that finds any action by name.
- Simple mode shows a shorter toolbar with the tools most people use. All tools brings back the rest.
- Work saves automatically after a pause, and each editor keeps a version history.
- In the document and spreadsheet editors, the Approvals tab lets an author request approval with a note. The approver sees the changed paragraphs or cells and approves or rejects with a reason without leaving the file. It appears only on shares where approval applies.
Viewers and editors are separate
Each kind of file (documents, spreadsheets, presentations and text) has two switches behind it, and they’re deliberately independent. The OpenDocument formats follow the switch for their Microsoft equivalent.
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 every viewer on 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.
- Spreadsheet formulas outside the set Bureau recalculates hold Excel’s cached answer until Excel next opens the file.
- Some things in a file can be shown but not edited, such as a pivot table’s calculated fields and some chart types. Bureau names them rather than breaking them.
- Co-editing is available for Word and OpenDocument text documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint decks and text files. It is not yet available for OpenDocument spreadsheets and presentations.
- 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.