This year, the Keynote of Microsoft's annual developer conference, Build, took place on May 19. This three-day annual conference features many interesting presentations for developers, but most people only watch the Keynote presentation, as this is usually where Microsoft announces its most important innovations.
One such announcement this year was the development of the Office Fluid Framework. To understand exactly what the fluid framework and fluid documents are, let's first talk about how we worked in the past and how we work today.
In the past, if someone in finance created a spreadsheet, they would open a new Excel file, create the report, and then send it to their colleague in an email, who would modify it, send the file back, and then make further modifications until the final report was created after 4-5 email exchanges. Of course, this included the possibility – especially if several people were working on the same document – that after a while it was no longer possible to track who had which version.
With the advent of SharePoint and OneDrive, this torture changed a lot. Colleagues now worked on just one file in the storage space, and after a while it became possible to edit a document together. The problem started when someone downloaded this report, attached it to an email, from where it was taken out, modified, inserted into a PowerPoint presentation, from where it was copied and put into another email, and from there into a… So a single document could still run through quite a few channels, thereby generating dozens of versions.
The Fluid office document brings us the solution to this problem. Imagine a spreadsheet, a report. This report can be placed in an email as a fluid document and sent to anyone. Let's take a case that has certainly never happened to anyone before, that the person thought of a change right after sending an email. In this case, the fluid document can be easily modified in a few seconds, so when the recipient of the email receives it, the correct data will be visible in it.
What exactly will the fluid document contain and what functionality will it have? The exact details are yet to be revealed, but the vision it outlines definitely looks promising.
Explore Fluid Framework Preview today: https://fluidpreview.office.net/