Microsoft 365 subscribers should be seeing a new and improved File Viewer rolling out this week. File Viewer is used for checking out over 300 non-Office-based file types in OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint, such as PDF documents or Photoshop images. The improvements should be live now for OneDrive work subscribers and SharePoint users. It will be added to Teams users later this year.
In a blog post, Microsoft outlined the new features and improvements to File Viewer. Perhaps the biggest addition is support for the Copilot generative AI assistant which actually won"t happen until sometime in May 2024. The company says once it goes live, Copilot can be used in File Viewer to create content summaries of any file in the viewer. Users can also ask questions about the content in those files and more. The new feature will also require a Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 license.
The new additions that are rolling out now include a new People view. This will let you see the other people who can access the file you are seeing in File Viewer via the people images at the top right corner of the file. There"s also a new Favorites feature, which lets you add the file you are checking out to your own favorites list. This can be added by clicking on or tapping the star icon at the top left of the app.
Another new feature, Open In App, will let people open a file they are viewing in File Viewer with their native app. They can then make changes and edits in the native app, and once saved, the file changes will be synced up back on your OneDrive account.
Here are the other new features that are being added. These will also need a SharePoint Premium subscription:
- PDF page removal and merging: Remove pages from PDFs and merge multiple PDFs into one.
- Annotations: Mark up and draw on a number of file types such as .ai, .dwg, .epub, .pdf, .rtf, and .tiff. Once done you can hide or display the annotations by selecting the annotations icon.
- eSignatures: Securely request electronic signatures directly in file viewer.
Finally, File Viewer in Microsoft 365 is getting a performance boost. Microsoft says the new File Viewer should display any files up to two times faster compared to the previous version.