Office Suite

The Nextcloud installation of your Federated Core works just like a product such as Dropbox(tm) or Google Drive(tm) and is compatible with office suites such as Microsoft Office(tm) or Libre Office(tm).

When you save a file from Microsoft Office(tm) or Libre Office(tm) to your “Files” on your Federated Core using your Nextcloud desktop client or the integration with Ubuntu-based Linux operating systems, that file is available for preview and work within the web interface of Nextcloud. This gives you maximum flexibility to work using desktop office tools or the web interface.

Let’s see how this might work. Note: you need to have the Nextcloud desktop client installed and configured, or your Ubuntu-based operating system configure to work with Nextcloud and the “Files” option turned on.

If you go to the “Files” application on Nextcloud in your browser at “nextcloud.domain.com” (where domaim.com is your domain name), you can click the big “+” (“plus”) symbol to get the following drop down.

In this example we will select and create a “New spreadsheet”. After giving our spreadsheet a name, Nextcloud opens a full-featured web editor for your spreadsheet. We’ve entered in some data. Changes are automatically saved.

Now, assuming the Nextcloud client is installed and configured, you can look in your file browser for your operating system and find the spreadsheet we created. Here’s what that looks like on Pop OS.

If you double click that, it will open in the office suite installed and configured to handle “xls*” files.

Here’s the same file synched to another machine running Windows.

And we can open the file and edit it in Excel…

Neat, huh? A couple of caveats. You can’t edit in Excel and expect to see the changes expressed in Libre Office on another machine. Excel and Libre Office don’t play nice together that way.

However, you can edit spreadsheets, documents, presentations and more on the web and then, using the share tools in Nextcloud “Files”, allow someone else to work on that file in the desktop editor of their choice.