Bureau opens your documents, workbooks, decks and plain text in the browser, and lets your team edit them there too (the editors are still labelled beta, and we say what that means below). Both the viewing and the editing happen on the page you already have open (for the formats Bureau draws itself, 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. (If a file has something Bureau can’t draw, an online viewer can step in; your administrator controls that, and can switch it off.)
Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, their OpenDocument cousins (.odt, .ods and .odp), CSV, and text files including Markdown (with the rendered page beside the source). Each one opens and saves in its own format, and each 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. OpenDocument files keep theirs the same way.
Decks open with a filmstrip and a full-screen Present mode that plays the deck’s own transitions and animations, from PowerPoint and OpenDocument decks alike, and you can add animations of your own. The Monday review doesn’t depend on someone having the right copy on their laptop. Or present to a link: anyone you send it to follows along live in their own browser, slide by slide, while you keep your notes and see who’s watching. It works on an appliance with no route to the internet, too (beta).
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.
In the document and spreadsheet editors, the author asks for approval with a note. The approver sees exactly which paragraphs or cells changed, and approves or rejects with a reason while looking at the file itself, rather than at an email about it. (That’s Reviews and approvals, on the Enterprise plan; the editor shows the Approvals tab on any share an admin has set to require sign-off.)
=FOLDR.FIELD puts a file’s custom field in a cell, =FOLDR.SEARCH lists the files that match a search down the sheet, and =FOLDR.LOOKUP reads cells from another workbook on your shares without opening it.
Press Ctrl+K in any of the editors and type what you’re after. Simple mode trims the toolbar to the tools most people use (everything else is one click away), work saves itself on a pause, and each editor keeps its own version history.
Microsoft’s formats and OpenDocument’s, edited natively rather than converted, 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, an online viewer can step in (your IT team controls that, and can switch it off) rather than showing your team a broken page. The old binary formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) open in your desktop apps rather than in Bureau.
Pages, headers, footnotes, tables, images and comments, drawn as a real page rather than an approximation of one, along with the equations, SmartArt, charts and old Windows metafile pictures that tend to trip viewers up. Fonts embedded in a document are used, and your organisation can upload its own.
Multiple sheets, charts, pivot tables, images, number formats and frozen panes, and a CSV saves back in the dialect it arrived in. 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, pictures and video, 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 and animations.
Log files, config, scripts, JSON, XML and Markdown (.txt, .md, .json, .xml, .yaml, .py 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. And for reading only, the viewer also opens PDFs (with find), TIFF scans, slide shows saved as .ppsx, and OpenDocument templates.
It used to be, and it’s the reason most people still save a copy and open it on the desktop. Bureau’s editors have grown well past that, into the work people actually reach for Excel, PowerPoint and Word to do.
Pivot tables with field wells, filters, grouping by date or number, and “show values as”. Charts you create, restyle, drag and resize. The newer functions whose results spill down the sheet (XLOOKUP, FILTER, UNIQUE, SORT, SEQUENCE, LET and friends), AutoSum on Alt+=, and formulas built by clicking cells, with F4 to anchor them.
Then the everyday things: conditional formatting, dropdown lists, named ranges, Excel tables with banding and a totals row, sorting on several columns at once, find and replace with regular expressions, grouped rows, protected sheets, and printing or saving to PDF when it’s done.
Animations and transitions play in Present mode, and you can add your own. Put a chart or a table on a slide and edit it there, crop or replace a picture, fill a shape with a gradient, group and ungroup, align and distribute, and move a slide onto another of its master’s layouts.
Video, speaker notes, comments, printing and find and replace across the whole deck come along too. Animations, charts, cropping and layouts all work in OpenDocument decks as well as PowerPoint’s.
Tracked changes with review and comment panes, a navigator for long documents, pictures with text wrapped around them, and printing or saving to PDF. Type “@” to drop in a person, a file, a field value or a date as a live chip.
Redaction is a mode of its own: mark the words that have to go, apply, and Bureau checks the result, so the name you blacked out isn’t still sitting in the file underneath. (It’s in Word and OpenDocument documents on the Business and Enterprise plans, and it isn’t offered while someone else is co-editing the file; finish the redaction first, then reopen it for the group.)
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.
Word and OpenDocument text documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint decks and plain text each have their own co-editing switch, and you turn it on per share as well, 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. Spreadsheet formulas outside the set Bureau recalculates keep Excel’s cached answer until Excel next opens the file. A few things in a file (a pivot table’s calculated fields, some chart types) can be seen but not edited, and Bureau tells you which by name rather than breaking them. Saving a Word document as OpenDocument, or the other way round, leaves images, footnotes and comments behind for now, and co-editing doesn’t yet reach OpenDocument spreadsheets and decks. 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 an online viewer that your IT team controls (and can switch off), 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. When it’s final, save it as a PDF and Sign takes it from there. Grace answers questions about a folder full of them. Reviews and approvals decide who had to approve it before anyone else saw it, and the approver can do that from inside the editor.
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