+1 from my side. I often need to link/attach other files (mainly office), so that would be really nice to have
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There are a lot of exciting things happening with Microsoft 365 development. I think ultimately there will be two solutions to this problem (not including iframes, which I think of as a workaround).
- Obsidian allows you to link to any file type and opens that link using the ādefault appā for your device.
- A third-party Obsidian plugin for Microsoft 365 that authenticates and allows access to your files for various purposes. Hopefully in the future Microsoft will support editable embeds.
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+1 I created a spreadsheet and made a link to it and was hoping it would open up in my default app, Excel. I could see plenty of other times in the future where I may want to link to local files that contain information not in Markdown.
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Iāve looked into the Microsoft 365 stuff as well. Very interesting developments. Do you think it could allow Obsidian to be a central part of using Windows?
Iām currently using a file:// link to reference external files. They do open on their default apps.
Made a Keyboard Maestro Macro to fetch the link to selected file and an Alfred Workflow to grab the link for the selected item.
Main problem is theyāre machine specific (i.e. they require an absolute path) and so will not work on other machines.
Definitely not ideal, but it works.
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Yes, please. I would be glad to use first way. Generally, lack of opportunity to work with non-supported files is one thing, that keeps me from using obsidian.
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It would be helpful and make the product more complete if also Office files would be displayed in the file browser and could be linked to.
While not ideal in reality it is just often the case that an original source file is an office document. It therefore makes sense to include these file types in a personal knowledge management tool.
Best would of course be to be able to view content in obsidian but that might come as a later extension.
Edit: And epub files 
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This is exactly what I need.
There has been extensive discussion already, and feature requests. Best to add support to those rather than start another thread.
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Yes, please. The first solution would be perfect. In general, using relative paths to me is much more preferable. That ensures portability to different systems and that the links will still work when the āfolders structureā moves together to a different location.
Relative paths not working is becoming a pain to me, unfortunately so as to make me think about Obsidian suitability for long term use (before I keep adding absolute paths and making the problem unmanageable laterā¦ 
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For me the benefit is: my vault is THE repository. If Iām working on a project and for some reason I have an Adobe Illustrator file (something.ai) which makes sense to reference in the note, I want it to be stored next to that note and not in a secondary repository that my note references.
If the attachments are kept in a different repository then it will be harder to keep them in sync and properly versioned.
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(Sorry, coming late to the party. Wrote this post in another thread before reading this one, and then it was moved here. So please forgive the repeated arguments.)
When you copy a PDF file to the vault, you can create a link to that file and display it inside Obsidian, using the [[filename.pdf]] or [pdf](filename.pdf) syntax. You can also embed and link to image file formats. This is very useful. Unfortunately, this currently only works with PDF and image files.
I suggest that Obsidian allows to do the same with other file formats, most importantly HTML. Currently, if you use the notation [[filename.html]] or [html](filename.html), then this does not work. Instead of showing the HTML file, Obsidian creates an empty filename.html.md file and opens that.
As a workaround you could use the [html](file:///path/filename.html) notation, but this only allows absolute file paths. This not only makes the links uglier and longer, and you must be careful with space characters in file names etc., but most of all, if you move the vault, these links will break. So this is not a viable replacement for an internal link.
And using an HTML link like <a href="filename.html">html</a> would be even uglier and does not work either anyway.
Some use cases:
- I have converted my Evernote notes to an Obsidian vault. In addition to a Markdown conversion of every note, I also keep the original note with the original formatting as HTML in the attachments folder of the same vault. I would like to link from the Markdown note to its Evernote original in HTML format, using the notation mentioned above.
- In order to fully replace a tool like Evernote, it should be possible to save snapshots of Internet pages in Obsidian. Usually it is sufficient to keep a Markdown conversion of Internet content. But sometimes when you have more complicated formatting and layout, you want to keep the original HTML. In these cases, you can save the page e.g. with the SingleFile Firefox add-on as HTML, and store this snapshot as part of the Obisidian vault inside the attachments folder. But then you need to have a way to link to this page.
- Some parts of your knowledge base are best stored as spreadsheets. It would be great if you could link to or embed to such spreadsheets in the attachment folder. Embedding spreadsheets is one of the useful features in OneNote - it would be great if Obsidian would at least have rudimentary support for linking to spreadsheets that are part of the vault.
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I am not disagreeing with this. Obsidian development is moving fast and my original comment is already stale 
. If you use Obsidian Sync, you can selectively sync non-md files, app performance keeps getting better, and search syntax more featured.
I would love to have one place for everything.
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Please add this feature. I work on a daily basis with Office documents and reference a lot to them.
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+1 - I am a student who would love to use Obsidian to plan my projects and then export them to docx (the only acceptable form for my program). Because my goal is to use this for my studies Iām a little worried about how Iām going to make this happen!
Agreed.
But until a direct export is potentially available, if you havenāt already tried it, you may want to check out exporting to a PDF then converting that PDF to .docx.
Good luck.
Note that this feature request is for including docx files in Obsidian Vaults, not exporting to docx.
(You may want to try opening your Obsidian docs in a different markdown writer. iA Writer has excellent export capabilities.)
Ah thank you, Iāll check that out! Iām also interested in including docx files in the vault. That would be extremely useful!
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Removed and reposted.
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Sounds too good to be true 