Integrating Microsoft Office documents

Hi @ckpiv,

thanks again for your time and effort trying to help me. I will have a look at Commander One and see if it can solve my problem.

Best regards

Hi, What does MoC mean?

Ah, I see!

Whereas I am a marketing copywriter. Obsidian, for me, is where work happens.

An MoC is a Map of Content. Essentially, it’s an index page or table of contents of the entire vault, or a portion of the vault.

I actually refer to mine as index pages, but I thought saying “MoC” would be more clearly understood on this forum. Guess I was wrong about that!

I do an index page per project, which also contain brief status updates on project progress. I also do higher-level index pages grouping related projects together. These higher-level pages are indexes of indexes.

Thank you

Hello. I created a symlink to a folder an included it on my vault. However, I can not see non-pdf files on my vault. Is there any other parameter to be change? I’m using MacOS Ventura 13.0.1.



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In Obsidian, settings, Files & Links, do you have “Detect all file extensions” on?

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sure blame your boss

it’s okay

we all use a little bit of msft now and then

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I hope it’s not far from the topic, but almost all my Office Documents are either in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or Sharepoint. For “integrating” the documents, I usually hotlink them to their location in OneDrive.

It’s not a perfect integration at all, but it helps to keep the documents in reach of the relevant notes.

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This was the ticket for me! Thanks @BarryPorter13 :slight_smile:

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I don’t keep working Microsoft documents in my vault, but sometimes I would like to have a Word or PowerPoint document render within a note in its final form. There’s lots of info about converting documents to Mark down. All I want to do is view the document within Obsidian. Does anyone know of any techniques to render an office 365 document within an obsidian note like you can do with pdf?

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If you’re looking for a render, why not save the doc as a pdf?

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This topic popped up as new in my notifications, so it seems appropriate for me—the person who started this topic—to post an update.

This is no longer a problem for me. Every writing project I work on has its own, separate folder. I drop Microsoft Office documents into that folder, alongside PDFs and Obsidian Markdown documents. And I toggle freely between the Finder and Obsidian all day to get my work done.

I have been doing this for about two years, and it does not seem to have caused problems.

@talundbl Why is it important to you to view the document in Obsidian? Why not just view it using the appropriate Office app or your web browser?

It’s easy to get tempted to use Obsidian as an everything app, when it’s not designed that way. Use Obsidian for what it’s great at, and use other apps for what they’re great at.

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If for some reason none of the other suggestions suit you, I suppose you could try embedding the online version of Word in a iframe.

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That is a good question. I suppose it isn’t that important. I’m moving over from OneNote, which I use as a running chronology of an open case with a master linking document that acts sort of like an MOC for that case. I was trying to mimick the “printout” display functionality of OneNote, without all the annoyances that come with OneNote (if you are familiar with that).

I was also thinking that I could render the documents in an Obsidian note with the metadata needed to run dataview queries for my indexing process rather than manually create tables and headings like I did in OneNote. But after considering it, maybe it is better to just manage tables manually with links to the url in Obsidian like I did with OneNote before.

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I’m playing around with creating “container notes,” comprising nothing but properties with an Obsidian link pointing to a Word document or PDF in an attachments folder.

Then I can run dataview queries on those container notes.

As you say, this may be more trouble than it’s worth.

And earlier this week I found myself wishing for an option to embed a Word document in an Obsidian note and preview the contents. I’m on a Mac, and theoretically this should be do-able by harnessing MacOS’s built-in preview tools; that’s how an app called DevonThink does it.

There’s a plugin that can automatically make notes for attachments, maybe called “Binary File Manager” (it definitely has “binary” in the name).

Thanks!

Hi Mitch,

This may be a better solution for me. I was playing with just dragging and dropping documents, emails, etc. into my index note and use that for organizing the project - that is until I remembered that I need some solution for archiving and exporting the project. Obsidian cannot export all linked documents along with the note as far as I know.

So, to be clear, you have a folder in obsidian for all your project index/moc notes, AND a separate folder for each project in obsidian for reference documents, pdfs, working docs, etc.?

In your initial post it sounded like you were also maintaining an external folder outside of obsidian for all those same documents:

Is that still the case? I’m still trying to decide between keeping all reference documents in Obsidian for internal linking or keeping all in onedrive and using onedrive links in the index notes obsidian (or, i suppose, both for redundancy).

For reference, I do some litigation and i like to use index notes to track correspondence, contract exchanges, orders, disclosure, etc. within one note. This way my master document folder is maintained chronologically but the organization/sorting of document references is done through links on a project index note along with my todo list.

Until recently, my system was one folder per project. Each folder contained all the documents needed for that project, including an index document, notes about the progress of the project and notes about the assignment, all Markdown documents and all Office documents and PDFs.

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with one folder for all projects for an individual client in a given year. Inside the “Projects 2024” folder for each client are all the markdown files associated with projects, including—very importantly—a “project note” for each individual project, containing notes about the assignment and progress and links to all the documents for that project.

Also inside the annual project folder is an “attachments” subfolder containing all Microsoft Office and PDF documents related to those projects. Each attachment document has an associated container note containing properties and a link to the attachment.

We’ll see how this works.