Your workspace, your office — editing documents in Oneva

If you've ever opened a Word document in a free webmail client and watched the formatting fall apart, you know the feeling. The web version isn't really the document — it's a guess at what the document looks like.

Oneva is different. When you double-click a .docx file in your Files app, the document opens in Collabora Online — a full LibreOffice running on your Oneva server, rendering your document the same way the desktop version would. Tables stay aligned. Fonts look right. Macros are preserved. You're editing the actual file, not a watered-down web copy.

What you can edit

Collabora handles everything Microsoft Office and LibreOffice can:

• Word documents (.docx, .doc, .odt) — full track changes, comments, headers, footnotes, sections
• Spreadsheets (.xlsx, .xls, .ods) — formulas, pivot tables, charts, conditional formatting
• Presentations (.pptx, .ppt, .odp) — animations, transitions, speaker notes, slide layouts
• Drawings (.odg)
• PDFs — view, fill in forms, add comments

Save the file and it's saved as the original format. No conversion. Your .docx stays a .docx.

Real-time collaboration

Open a document with a colleague at the same time and you'll see their cursor. Type at the same time and you'll see each other's changes appear letter by letter. Same as Google Docs, except the document lives on your own server and nothing is uploaded anywhere.

You can:

• See who's editing right now (avatars in the top right)
• Comment on a paragraph and tag people
• Track changes with proper revision marks

For shared notes, meeting minutes, or working on a document together, it just works.

Files: more than just a folder

Behind the office editor sits Nextcloud's Files app — your private cloud storage. It works like Dropbox or OneDrive, but it's yours.

• Folders and subfolders, with drag-and-drop
• Sharing internally with other users in your workspace
• Public links with optional passwords and expiry dates — for sharing files with people outside Oneva
• File requests — let someone upload a file to a folder without giving them access to anything else
• Versions — every edit is kept, restore any previous version with one click
• Trash — deleted files are recoverable
• Search and tags — find files quickly across your workspace
• Photo gallery view — image folders show as thumbnails, with a built-in slideshow

The Files app is also where attachments from your email land, where shared documents from your team appear, and where notes from the Notes app are stored. Everything is in one place.

Sync to your computer

You don't have to use the browser. The Nextcloud Desktop client for Mac, Windows, and Linux gives you a folder on your computer that syncs with your workspace. Drop a file in, it appears in the browser. Edit it locally, the change syncs everywhere.

Combined with Collabora Office installed locally on your computer, you can edit documents offline and they'll sync the moment you're back online — no special "upload" step.

Public links, the way they should work

Need to send a 200 MB file to someone? Don't. Send them a link instead.

Click the share icon, generate a link, optionally set a password and expiry date, copy it. The recipient downloads the file from your workspace directly. No size limits beyond your own disk space. No "this file has been shared with the link" warning to Google about who's looking at what.

If you're sending something sensitive, set a password. If you only need it available for a week, set an expiry. The file is gone from public access the moment you delete the share — but the original stays in your workspace.

What about my existing files?

Your Oneva workspace ships ready to receive them. Drag a folder into the browser and it uploads. Or install the Nextcloud Desktop client and copy your files into the synced folder — they'll appear in your workspace in the background.

The files keep their structure, their dates, and their format. There's no "Oneva format" — everything is just standard files, in standard formats, in folders. The day you decide to leave (we hope you don't), you can take them all with you the same way they came in.

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That's the office side of Oneva. Real documents, real collaboration, real sync — without sending your work to a company on the other side of the world.

Next up: the part that ties it all together — calendars, contacts, and Talk, the parts of a workspace that aren't files but make everything else useful.