Using Office Preview for Windows 10 with Office 365

Posted Thursday, February 5, 2015 3:08 PM by CoreyRoth

The new touch-friendly Office Preview apps for Windows 10 (aka Office Universal Apps for Windows 10) have native support for connecting to your personal OneDrive as well as Office 365.  When you first install the apps, they will take over your file associations.  When opening any of the desktop applications in Office 2013, you’ll see this right away as it prompts you to restore file associations.

PowerPointPreviewFileAssociationsWarning

Since you can associate Office documents with the new Word Preview, Excel Preview, and PowerPoint Preview apps, that means we can use them to open documents in Office 365.  That means if you choose the option “Edit in PowerPoint” like in the example below, it will open with PowerPoint Preview.

PowerPointPreviewOWAOpenInPowerPoint

Windows 10 will open PowerPoint Preview for you and start opening the document from Office 365.

PowerPointPreviewOpenDocumentOneDriveForBusiness

Be warned, that opening documents from Office 365 takes a considerable amount of time.  This issue could be isolated to the tenant I was using though.

PowerPointPreviewOpenFromOffice365

If you haven’t added your Office 365 account to the Office Preview Apps for Windows 10 yet, you will be prompted for credentials when you first connect.

PowerPointPreviewNoCredentials

Now you can edit your document as normal.  Remember, that the Save button is gone now and your changes will be updated automatically as you type.

One thing I discovered in this process is that the apps do not support SharePoint 2007 (don’t ask me why I know).  I haven’t tried SharePoint 2010 yet, but I suspect it will work.  If you do try it, leave a comment and let us know how it went.

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