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Under review

Preview MS Office Files with local preview app/generator

Tom 2 weeks ago in Feature requests • updated by Vlad R 2 weeks ago • 1

Hi FileRun Dev team,

I would like to suggest an additional way of previewing MS Office document. I already found a somewhat similar discussion of this subject on the Reddit FileRun forum .

Up to my knowledge I can use for MS Office Documents preview:

- Google Docs

- Office Web Viewer/Office356

- OnlyOffice

Google Docs and Office Web Viewer/Office365 are cloud services and therefore bring up data privacy concerns. OnlyOffice offers a community version of the OnlyOffice document server as well as an enterprise version. Even as a docker installation it needs its own database and is a rather big package wit considerable dependencies for only previewing MS Office files.

As a conclusion, I would like to suggest to offer LibreOffice for MS Office files preview. It works for that use case in NextCloud (see https://www.allerstorfer.at/nextcloud-install-preview-generator/ for example) with a rather lightweight, local LibreOffice installation and a preview app in NextCloud. I see the advantage of my suggestion in the absence of data privacy concerns paired with a local and lightweight installation of the preview app.

Perhaps you may consider this feature suggestion for future FileRun versions.

Under review
Vlad R 2 weeks ago

Just for sake of completion I would add that there is also the "Office" plugin, which, opens the file using MS Office, if installed on the user's computer.

ONLYOFFICE DocumentViewer is indeed not a lightweight application.

I am going to check the LibreOffice option and post here shortly after. Thank you for the suggestion.

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