I vowed to quit chiming in on another thread, but now I’m tempted to reach 200 posts. So let’s see what I can do
The “open in” round-trip method to edit documents outside of DTTG seems to have finally arrived in Microsoft Office, albeit with slight complications.
Suppose I have an Excel sheet in DTTG. I can then use “open in” and choose “copy to Excel”. Then Excel will open the file, but in “read only” mode. To edit it, you have to quickly save it. After editing, one uses “Send a copy > Send with another app” in the upper right corner. Then the edited file successfully returns to DTTG, replaces the initial one, but the word “copy” is attached to the filename. Typically I will later on, during maintenance, on OS X remove that filename appendix, and I will also remove the intermediately saved file, that, in my case, Excel writes to Dropbox.
While slightly more cumbersome than doing the same roundtrip with other apps, such as iAnnotate or Goodreader, this finally lets me use Office files from within DTTG on iOS.
This is a quirk of Office products on iOS (Word and PowerPoint do the same thing.) I’ve always wondered why MS designed the process this way. It’s like, "hold on a minute – why do I have to copy this thing – I just sent you a copy "
But yes – the main thing is that round-tripping is working very well in Office and everywhere else I’ve tried it with DTTG2. And the file names are not incomprehensible anymore
This works in a similar way in Numbers too: the DEVONthink version is updated in place after the roundtrip and a copy is left in Numbers, which is easy to clean up in the numbers app.
I can’t get it to work in Drafts though. Drafts has actions called Share and Open In. Share only has Clip to DEVONthink, whereas Open In has both Clip to DT and Import to DT. Using the latter creates a new copy in DTTG rather than updating the original in place. The filename is the date and time of import, and not the previously incomprehensible name, so that at least is an improvement.
Drafts doesn’t have “files” as such. It has a library of your snippets. There is no file name – just the first line of text, used as an identifier for that snippet. Matching these things back to DTTG2 isn’t possible.
I just found this thread and I need this use case pretty often to open and edit excel files on the go. This hack would work for me but unfortunately I lost you have way
If I want to edit the excel file I’ll do the following:
I use “open in” and choose “copy to Excel”. Then Excel will open the file, but in “read only” mode. To be able to edit it, I save it in a temporary folder.
But what comes next?
The file in DTTG won’t get updated of course because it’s a different file. But how can I get the newly updated version as substitute of the old file in the same folder/tagged in DTTG?
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