Sharepoint 2013 : Office 2013 and an Overview of Integration (part 2) - Opening and Saving to SharePoint

2. Opening and Saving to SharePoint

Office and SharePoint are like husband and wife, especially in enterprise environments (although perhaps not for the real husband and wife relationship in the workplace). After opening an Office document on your local PC, you surely want to upload it to SharePoint for version management and collaboration.

As a general practice, I upload any document in process to SharePoint immediately, because this gives me peace of mind that my document is in a safe place and available, should my local PC crash. You will see later that uploading unfinished documents to SharePoint also allows for co-authoring and editing, which is possible only when your document resides in a shared location.

I assume that by now you are familiar with SharePoint document libraries and how you upload documents to these libraries via your web browser. However, there must be a better way—can you open and save documents from and to SharePoint directly from the Office application?

Saving to SharePoint

I shall start with a scenario in which you might have opened a new instance of PowerPoint—or any other Office application—have made some edits to a new document, and now wish to save the document to SharePoint. As described earlier, you start from the backstage area by clicking the File tab on the ribbon.

• 1.  Click the File tab in the Office application (my example uses PowerPoint 2013).
• 2.  Click the Save As left navigation tab.
• 3.  You should see some saving options, like those in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Save As tab in PowerPoint 2013

Looking at the Save As tab in Figure 3, you can see three options: save to SkyDrive, save to the local computer, or add another place.

Saving to SharePoint from Office 2013 is different from that of Office 2010. Forget looking for the Send to SharePoint operation under the Save and Send heading—Microsoft has changed the save operations to: Saving to the cloud via SkyDrive and Office 365, Saving to on-premise SharePoint via SkyDrive Pro, and publishing for a specific purpose, such as publishing to a blog from Word, or publishing to a slide library from PowerPoint.

Personally, I miss the very explicit option to save to SharePoint within Office 2010 but can understand Microsoft’s need to reduce confusion, now that SharePoint exists both as an on-premise service and in the cloud.

Fortunately, Office 2013 and SharePoint still support saving to a URL (via WebDAV). The following steps continue to demonstrate how to save an open document to SharePoint by providing the URL of the destination document library:

• 4.  Select the option to save to the computer.
• 5.  Click the Browse icon.
• 6.  In the dialog that appears, enter the on-premise SharePoint document library URL in the location field (at the top of the dialog).
• 7.  Give the file a name.
• 8.  Click the Save button.

Opening from SharePoint

Opening an existing Office document from SharePoint is less confusing than Save As, but just as easy. In this scenario and my example, a document resides in a document library in a SharePoint 2013 team site.

Figure 4 shows a screenshot of my example document library in my SharePoint 2013 team site. Depending on whether you have installed Office Web Applications (OWA), clicking on the document name (link) will either open the document on the Office application on the local computer (assuming you installed Office) or within OWA. The following steps demonstrate how to open the document in the local Office application:

1. Click the ellipsis to the right of the document name in the document library.
2. A pop-up should appear.
3. Click the Edit link.
4. Accept the warning about opening files from the web (assuming you trust the document).

Figure 4. Document in SharePoint 2013 document library

Now that you have opened a document from SharePoint (or successfully saved a new document to SharePoint, I would like to point out a few user interface changes in the Office application. Figure 5 shows the quick save icon at the top left of the application, with synchronization symbol. This indicates that the document resides in a location that supports collaboration (such as SharePoint); clicking this icon will save any local changes and retrieve any changes from the server.

Figure 5. New quick save icon

From within your Office application, click the File tab and then the Save As tab in the left navigation, as I demonstrated earlier. You should notice a new option in the list of save options: Other Web Locations (Figure 6). Office is smart enough to know that you opened/saved your document to a location accessible via web browser. This option in the Save As tab now provides a list of recent locations that you have saved documents to and the familiar Browse button to browse to another web location (via WebDAV).

Figure 6. Save to Other Web Locations

You can also open a document from SharePoint via the Office application user interface, as follows:

1. Click the File tab in the Office application.
2. Click the Open tab in the left navigation tabs.
3. If you saved the document to a SharePoint location earlier, you may see the same location in Recent Folders under the Other Web Locations.
4. You can browse the location of a SharePoint document library, similarly to how you browsed to a save location. Either use the Browse button under Other Web Locations or under Computer and paste a URL of a SharePoint site.