We recommend watching this video tutorial so you can see SharePoint in action.
You can also read our written tutorial below.
Video Transcript
Hi there! I’m Ashlyn with Fixed Fee IT, Portland Oregon’s best IT support. Welcome back to our series on everything you need to know about SharePoint. Today, we’re walking through how to open SharePoint files in a few different ways:
First, From the SharePoint WebApp to the web app for the office application
Second, From the SharePoint WebApp to the Desktop Office App
And Last, From the Desktop Office App to the Share Point Web App
If you’re looking for a specific section of this tutorial, hover over the progress bar and select the part you need. Otherwise, let’s get started….
From the SharePoint WebApp to the web app for the office application
First, let’s look at how to open a file in the SharePoint web app in the appropriate Office 365 web app. With this method, you will be staying in your web browser the entire time.
To start, head over to your Sharepoint site and locate the document you would like to open. Here we have a word document. When you hover over the document, you’ll notice these 3 dots. Go ahead and click those and hover over “open”. For this instance, let’s click “open in browser”. Your document should now open in a new tab. This is the Word web application, where you can make edits to your document in real time, all of which save automatically as long as you’re connected to the internet.
From the SharePoint WebApp to the Desktop Office App
Now let’s say you want to open that same file online from SharePoint but in your Desktop Office application. With this method, you will be starting in your web browser and editing on your desktop.
So let’s go back to that original document location in Sharepoint. hover over the document, and locate the 3 dots. Go ahead and click those and hover over “open”. This time, click “open in app”. You may get a popup requesting Chrome to access your desktop app. If so, go ahead and allow that. Now, you should be in your Word app on your desktop.
One thing I want to point out is that in the desktop app, you have the ability to turn “autosave” off and on. You can find that feature in the upper left-hand corner.
If this switch is in the on position, all changes you make will be saved to the document automatically, as long as you’re connected to the internet.
If this switch is in the off position, you’ll have to save your files like you normally would, by going to file and save. You can also save different copies of this document by going to file, save as, and creating a new copy that way. However, in this new document autosave is on. That’s because Microsoft automatically assumes you want to enable autosave. You will need to manually disable it here if you do not want that feature.
From the Desktop Office App to the Share Point Web App
Finally, let’s look at how to open a file in your desktop office app and to the SharePoint web app With this method, you will be starting on your desktop and finishing in Sharepoint.
Let’s open our shared word document in our desktop app. Since it’s already in Sharepoint, we have this option up here in the upper-right hand corner called “share”. Click that, and you’ll have a variety of options for sharing this document. The easiest method is to click “copy link” and paste this link in your browser’s address bar. This will take you directly to the online word app, so you can now close your desktop app and edit in-browser.
All edits you make will be automatically saved, as long as you are connected to the internet.
And that’s all I have for you in this section. Now you should be able to open SharePoint files from the web and your desktop. Check out our other SharePoint tutorials in our playlist. If you still have questions, feel free to reach out to our team at Fixed Fee IT. Thanks for watching!
