Documents

Office documents —Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the open formats— are viewed and edited in the browser, directly on the files in your shared folders. Nothing gets locked anywhere: the .docx you edit here is the same one that opens over SMB from any computer. For plain-text notes and jottings there is the Notepad, which is a different thing and has its own guide.

Viewing without installing anything

Looking needs no editor: double-clicking a .docx, .xlsx or .pptx in Files shows it converted to PDF, read only and without touching the original. That is what one does 99% of the time with a document just received, and it works from day one. The reason for converting instead of interpreting: a document with broken formatting is worse than not seeing it, so the conversion is done by a real office suite inside the NAS and the browser shows the PDF, which every browser draws the same.

The document editor

To edit in the browser —you and the household, each with their own account— the NAS carries a full document editor. It ships not downloaded on purpose: the image weighs several gigabytes, and on a NAS where nobody edits documents those would be wasted gigabytes.

• The first time someone presses "Edit" on a document, the panel offers to install it (an administrator's job): a task with progress, then ready forever.
• The editor opens in its own tab, with the whole document: writing, spreadsheets with formulas, presentations. On save, the file in your folder is updated — and it is still a normal .docx that opens anywhere else.
• At rest it sleeps: it costs no memory until someone opens a document (the first opening of the day takes a few seconds longer, and says so).

The editor does not see your disks

It deserves its own section, because it is the security decision of this whole piece: the editor runs locked inside its container, without the shared folders. When you open a document, the NAS lends it —only that file, only to you, only for a while— and collects it on save. The permission tells viewing from editing apart: whoever can only view a folder cannot save changes to its documents no matter how much editor they have in front of them. And changing the password or "Close all sessions" cuts its access on the spot, like any other session.

How it fits with the rest

• Documents are normal files: they go into backups, they have versions if there are snapshots, and they are shared like any file — a link downloads the document for someone without an account.
• The editor is one more application in the Package Center: it updates and shows in Containers like the rest.