Office documents

Since v0.105.0, office documents stored in Trilium display an inline preview of their content, without the need to download them or open them in an external application.

Supported formats#

  • Microsoft Office formats: Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx) and PowerPoint (.pptx).
  • The OpenDocument alternatives to the previous formats (Text, Spreadsheet, Presentation), created by editors such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
  • Rich Text Format (RTF).
  • EPUB e-books.

How it works#

The document is converted to a simplified representation on the server and rendered as read-only content, similar to a Text note.

The preview generally preserves:

  • Headings, paragraphs and text alignment.
  • Text formatting: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, subscript/superscript, text and highlight colors, fonts and font sizes.
  • Bulleted and numbered lists.
  • Tables, including merged cells and cell background colors.
  • Embedded images.
  • Links and footnotes.

To keep links readable regardless of the theme, the default hyperlink color applied automatically by word processors is ignored; links that were deliberately given a custom color by the author keep it.

Limitations#

  • The preview is read-only. To edit the document, download it or open it in an external application; the content of the note is not affected by the preview. Alternatively copy and paste it into a text note.
  • The preview is a simplified rendering: complex layouts (columns, text boxes, headers and footers), charts and the precise styling of table borders are not reproduced.
  • Documents larger than 20 MB are not previewed, to keep the server responsive. The usual download and open actions remain available.
  • If the document cannot be converted, a notice is displayed instead and the file can still be downloaded or opened externally.

Relation with other features#

  • The same preview is used when an office document is displayed in the Note List or embedded in a text note via Include Note, as well as for office documents stored as Attachments.
  • Independently of the preview, the text content of office documents is also extracted in the background so that it can be found with Search via Text Extraction (OCR).
  • .csv and .xlsx files can be converted to Spreadsheets via the import function.