The powerful integration of Egnyte and Microsoft Office Online enables a seamless user collaboration experience. This article covers how to use the Office Online integration, but you can also leverage the Egnyte Add-in for Microsoft and use Egnyte for Office from your mobile device (iOS, Android, and Windows). In addition, Egnyte's support for Office Online's co-authoring capability enables multiple users to simultaneously edit the same document while viewing changes made by others in real-time.
Skip Ahead to...
Create a New Microsoft Office365 File
Open and Edit an Office File
Additional Information
Create a New Microsoft Office 365 File
You can create a new Office 365 File (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) directly from your Egnyte WebUI in just a few easy steps.
Navigate to your Egnyte WebUI, click on the + Create drop-down, and select the type of file you'd like to create – for example Word Online Document. Alternatively, if you intend to create the document from the template, navigate to the sub-menu by hovering on > and then select From Template from the dropdown and finally select the specific template from the subsequent dropdown.
Creating Documents from a Specific Folder:
Creating Documents from the Home Dashboard:
The option to create documents will not be available if Microsoft Office and Google Workspace integrations are not enabled for the domain/user.
Based on the type of file, it will take you to a new tab where you specify the file name as shown below, and start working on the new file. All changes are automatically saved within Egnyte.
The default location for the documents created from the home dashboard will be Private/User’s Private Folder Name/Quick Created Files/YYYY, where YYYY is the year in which the document is created.
For example, if the document is created on 15th December 2022 and the user’s private folder name is myprivatefolder, then the default location will be Private/myprivatefolder/Quick Created Files/2022.
This will help the user structure the documents created from the home dashboard for easy management.
Note this folder will get created in the user’s private folder when the user clicks on the Create menu from the home dashboard.
Creating Documents from a Template
If you are creating the document from the template, you will be prompted to enter the name for the new document to be created and then the document created will be opened in the new tab for editing and collaboration. All changes are automatically saved within Egnyte.
If the document is in a format which is not supported for co-editing, the document created from the template will not open for editing. In such a case, if the user is creating the document from the home dashboard, the user will get an option to either preview the file or navigate to the folder where the document is created as shown below.
However, if the user is creating the document from within a folder, the user will get a confirmation notification as shown below.
Open and Edit an Office File
To open a file in Office Online, right-click on the file (or click the checkbox next to a file), hover over Open In..., and choose Edit in Word Online.
You may need to log in using your Office 365 account periodically to verify your subscription is active. Once you've done that, you should see your file is ready for editing.
To edit the file, simply make the desired changes to the file. Any changes are automatically saved to Egnyte as they are made.
Additional Information
Office 365 Licensing Requirements
You must have a valid Office 365 for Business subscription to edit files. More information on Office 365 for Business licensing is available here.
Supported File Types
You may notice some Office files have an Edit option while others may only have a View option. This is because Microsoft Office Online only supports their newer file formats (e.g., docx, pptx, xlsx) for editing in Office Online. Others are supported in a view-only mode. A list of supported extensions is available here.
Other Notes
- Office Online has a more limited feature set than the installed version of Office. Many special features like forms, advanced document elements, etc., can result in an error message prompting you to use read-only mode.
- Microsoft imposes API size limits for Office Online files. API limitations are imposed equally on all of Microsoft's partners. Egnyte's own API is not limited by these constraints; it will automatically allow larger files to work with Microsoft applications when Microsoft removes or reduces their limitations. Refer to this helpdesk article for the specific limits for Office Online application.