Forum Discussion
Edit PDF in sharepoint online
Dear community, I am trying to edit pdfs stored in a document library on sharepoint with no success. Is this possible at all to do? Regards!
I just set up an entire workflow for staff and important committee members in which the committee members, who are external users, would mark up a fillable PDF with comments in comment boxes I created as fillable fields. I just got an email back from one of them saying his comments disappeared after he filled them in. The entire point of this was to make document review and commenting as easy as possible with as few clicks as possible. Requesting a committee of six people either use internet explorer (you overestimate how many people even know what the word 'browser' means) and follow additional steps, or download and reupload (bad, bad, bad practice in any situation) the PDF is not even under consideration. It's humiliating that I did a training for everyone, created documentation, and then come to find out that a feature that should be there isn't.
(While MS is at it, please make fillable PDFs appear in their fillable form upon clicking on the file name in SharePoint - as it is, you have to hover over the file, click the vertical dots > Open > Open in browser for the file to even appear in its fillable form - which as previously detailed is a bait and switch anyway, since if you fill it out, it won't save)
- I've an example by Laura Rogers using Word quick parts that map to SharePoint columns, you can lock the Word document so only the fields are editable. This does have the same editing problem as you have to open it in Word for quickparts to work but you could set the default library open to default to client application.https://wonderlaura.com/2019/01/09/microsoft-flow-quick-parts/
I just finished doing that but your suggestion to set the library to default open to client app I'll do now. Thanks Alan. But if any MS staff is reading, this fix doesn't suffice. Issue *not* resolved. Nothing short of near-total Adobe-MS integration will do in the business world...if MS can't imitate PDF features for IP reasons. You see my end users don't care what they click on. They just want to click on something once and have it work right. This is the smartphone mentality. People are no longer used to having to hunt around on screens for things.
