Can you please provide a status of this request? Our Global IS team has indicated that for this functionality to work, all users are required to have an Adobe Cloud account, in which our organization is not interested. Do you know if there are plans in place to allow for a direct way to open PDFs in a desktop application without Adobe Cloud?

I can see that this was submitted in 2020 and last commented on in early 2021. This is a large business need. Thanks.

Hi Sanchi,

Thank you for replying to this feature request.

I strongly agree with Joel's reply below. Note that his SharedScreenshot.jpg is obviously for a PDF and SharedScreenshot2.jpg is for an Office file. Having a third option for PDFs to "Open in app" is what we are looking for.

We use Edge (we are migrating to Microsoft Edge before Legacy Edge no longer supported this March), Chrome, and Firefox. We do not use Safari (even on Macs) and we do not use IE since Microsoft is phasing it out. Having this feature in Chrome would be great.

Finally, we are looking for the functionality you mentioned where opening an Office document from SharePoint (SP) in the corresponding app (i.e., opening a Word document in the local Word application or opening an Excel spreadsheet in the local Excel app), the local app knows the file is in SP just like Adobe Document Cloud does. When one of these files is saved, the changes are saved in SP.

Let me know if you need additional information. I look forward to further updates on this request.

Justin

Sanchi, thanks for the reply.

Several things happen when working with pdf files in OneDrive/SharePoint.

In the online interface we can chose to:

1. "preview" in the built in OneDrive/SharePoint file viewer
2, Open in Browser (opens in the browser's viewer, usually Edge (chromium) or Chrome, or
3. If we have acrobat cloud we can open in the cloud and do at lease some editing and arranging.

Each of the above works for certain things. Opening in acrobat clouds is fine for small things, but doesn't work well when working with large files or when we want to do more detailed markups, or add signatures, etc.

Quite often we need to combine, bookmark, or sign, larger reports that are too large to work with in the acrobat cloud interface. Instead, we need to add the library and open from the Desktop App (a reasonably simple but still somewhat clunky process) or sync the SharePoint library or folder locally. Either option requires a bunch of extra time/steps and each has some advantages and disadvantages.

When we open an MS Office Document from the online interface we can preview, open on the web, or open in the desktop app. Giving the option to right click on a PDF in SharePoint and being able to open and edit the PDF in the desktop app similar to the process for M365 apps and have it save changes back to SharePoint with version history would be a really useful feature and would eliminate the need to add or sync so many libraries.

Hi Joel/Justin,

Thanks for reporting this requirement.

I have few queries:
From the line "to open a file in the Adobe desktop app directly from SharePoint" it is not getting clear where does Sharepoint site open whether in browser or in windows explorer? If you access Sharepoint files from browser then which browser is it most of the time?

Currently, we are working on chrome browser to provide similar facility(to open SP file directly in desktop application and save back to server).

Thanks
Sanchi

Being able to click on a document in SharePoint and OneDrive and have it open in the local Acrobat application, like the Microsoft Office files work, would be great! Adding each SharePoint site and your OneDrive account becomes tedious and unproductive when you have a lot of sites to add or every time you use a different computer. This is the biggest complaint I hear from my customers and when talking to others in IT.

Thank you in advance for considering this request.