Understanding how Office documents will open from Atlas

You may be aware that there are a number of different ways that Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint - not PDFs or other file types) can be accessed in SharePoint:

• Open in the Browser - the document is opened in the appropriate Office Web Application and any changes made in this mode are saved directly back to the file in SharePoint
• Open in the Client Application - the document is opened in the full Office application installed on your device, but it is not downloaded. Any changes can be saved directly back to the file in SharePoint
• Download and Open - not recommended - the browser downloads a copy of the document from SharePoint and opens the copy in the full Office application installed on their device. Any changes are saved to the downloaded copy of the document, which would then need to be uploaded back into SharePoint, overwriting the file you originally downloaded. 

SharePoint provides a number of settings at different levels to help control how documents are handled when clicked in Atlas, one setting at the Site Collection level (e.g. per Atlas workspace) which controls the default behaviour for that workspace, but it can then be overridden on a specific Document Library.

Differences in web browsers

Not all web browsers have exactly the same behaviour but they should still respect the above settings. Edge is the latest browser developed by Microsoft, and as you might expect they have built in functionality that supports documents being opened directly in the client application, and the same behaviour is also supported in Chrome. If users are using Edge or Chrome we can simply set the appropriate settings for each workspace and the contained document libraries.

Opening from Atlas Web Parts

At the time of writing the above settings only work correctly when the document is opened from the library itself, but the default behaviour may not be the same in Atlas web parts.

In Atlas 2.2 onwards, In Focus web part cards will include an ellipsis (...) menu, from which the user can choose to Open in browser or Open in app if the default behaviour is not what they want: