Files.com offers a full-featured in-browser file editor and online previewer for typical work document types such as documents, spreadsheets and presentations. This is used both for authoring and for viewing a variety of document types, depending upon each user's permissions to the file they're accessing.

Alternatively, a site administrator can instead enable our Microsoft Office for Web integration. This will replace the default Files.com editor with Microsoft Office for Web for viewing and editing standard productivity suite formats.

The Files.com editor programs support many advanced features such as high-fidelity rendering, advanced styling and formatting, spreadsheet analysis tasks, and transitions and presenter mode for presentations.

The Files.com editor offers mail merge, importing CSV documents into spreadsheets, adding watermarks to documents, even dragging contents from one document into another – all within your browser, without needing a separate application.

Hosted Within the Files.com Infrastructure

The Files.com editor is completely hosted within the Files.com infrastructure. Using the Files.com editor means that the files do not leave our own managed infrastructure and will not be transmitted to an external service.

This is unlike many competing services that use managed SaaS services from Microsoft or Zoho, which require sending your documents to those vendors in order to facilitate the collaborative editing environment.

To support co-editing, the Files.com editor environment uses temporary storage and processing in our USA region regardless of the region in which files are stored permanently. This temporary storage is managed automatically by Files.com and files are not retained in the USA beyond an editing session.

Maximum Supported File Sizes

While the Files.com platform can handle file sizes up to 5TB, the Files.com editor has smaller limits for the size of file that can be opened.

For document files and spreadsheet file types, the maximum file size is 950MB. Presentation files are limited to 150MB.

These limits apply to all the extensions that do not require conversion, such as DOCX, as well as those requiring conversion, such as CSV or EPUB.

Files that exceed the maximum size for editing cannot be previewed.

Logging Changes from the Files.com Editor

Using the Files.com editor will create new entries in your file activity history. The interface shown in logs for these entries will be "Office".

Creating a new work document in your site will appear in the logs as creating the file, just as if you uploaded it.

Previewing a file using the Files.com editor will be logged as a file download, because the file is being downloaded from your storage to the editor. Similarly, opening a file for editing using the Files.com editor will appear in your logs as a file download.

While you are editing a file using the Files.com editor, the editor will automatically save your changes every 2 to 5 minutes. These saves will appear as changes in the file history.

When you close the Files.com editor, any changes that have not been saved yet will be automatically saved, and this will appear as a change in your file history.

During a co-authoring session with multiple people, all the entries in the activity history will appear with the user ID of the first person to start the session.

Email Notifications

Using the Files.com editor will trigger folder activity email notifications.

When a new document is created within your site, this will trigger upload notifications.

When a document is previewed or opened in the editor, it is downloaded from the storage to the document editor, which will trigger notifications for downloads. If you are opening a file type that requires conversion before it can be edited, the system will first upload the converted document, then download that new file to open in the editor. The initial upload and the download can trigger notifications.

While you are editing a document using the Files.com editor, the editor will automatically save your changes every 2 to 5 minutes. These saves will trigger notifications for uploads. Autosaving only happens when the document is being worked on; leaving the editor open for several minutes with no changes will not trigger uploads back to your storage from the editor.

When you close the Files.com editor, your changes will be uploaded to the storage. This triggers upload notifications. If your document was not changed since it was last auto-saved, the document won't be auto-saved again when you close the editor.