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.