Edit PDF in sharepoint online

Deleted
Not applicable

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! 

 

66 Replies
Hi Carl,
PDFs should be opened in your browser with no problems...can you share more details about what issues are you having?

Hi Juan, 

Thank you for replying. Opening the PDF is not a problem, but I would like to be able to edit the PDF in the browser. Such as annotations or comment the text. 

 

Regards, 

Carl 

Well,
To do that, the only thing you can do (unless there is a browser Plugin that allows to do it) is to download the PDF file, edit it in your local PC and upload it again to the document librar. As an alternative to download the PDF file, you can sync to your PC using OneDrive For Business Sync Client and just edit the file using your PDF reader.

Microsoft and Adobe are working hard to have a better integration of Adobe in Office 365, so we can expect improvements in PDF documents edition in Office 365 in the future

Are you aware of any timeline for such a feature / app to be available to 365 users?

 

Hi Carl,

As an alternative, if you have Acrobat Adobe DC (and possibly other instances), it is possible to map a SharePoint library with Adobe itself.

I agree it's really disappointing that we cannot force .pdfs to open in the desktop application.

Like Juan says, hopefully, we will get some better integration soon.

For some of our users, this is enough to stop them from using SharePoint.
It may not always be possible for all your documents but if they aren't too custom, you can open PDFs in Word.

Actually, the responses above are partially correct. You are able to edit the pdf in place with a few extra clicks. As long as you have an adobe version installed that has edit capabilities....try this

 

  • Make sure you are in Internet Explorer - yes, I know its slow but it's the only way to get to "explorer" view
  • View your library in explorer
    • Classic Experience - Go to the library tab and select "Open with Explorer"
    • Modern Exp - Click the view drop down and select the "View in File Explorer" view
  • Double click on your pdf and adobe will launch
  • Follow the prompts...it will ask you to check out the file (even if you don't have check in/out turned on)
  • Make your edits
  • Save and check in

Please let us know if this works

 

It Works - Thanks!

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. 

Hey. I have been using Acrobat Adobe DC for last several years. Of course you may use even Word for editing but I prefer pdf maker to create and edit pdf files in the brower it's easy and convenient you just can do it in your browser but there's also a desktop version there.

Agree. I have complaint directly to Microsoft for this lack of functionality as it is incredibly frustrating for users. I can't believe companies like Dropbox and Box already offer this functionality but SharePoint doesn't. Truly painful to even advocate for SharePoint with end users.

Hope Microsoft and Adobe get on a solution for this very soon.

@Michael Malloy this worked for me!  Thanks for the post!

While this is a workaround, this should not be the acceptable experience we require from Microsoft. Similar if I want to open an Office file in Word Online or the desktop version, I get to choose how to open the PDF in Adobe with check-in/out functionality with only one-click, from any browser. That's the acceptable and usable workflow for end users. Period.

@Juan Gonzalez 

 

Seriously? R-E-L-A-X 

Sure buddy (◔_◔)

@Deleted and all other views of this thread - please up-vote this feature in UserVoice.
Don't relax (or be-lax) as some have suggested here - use you voice and vote here:
https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/264636-general/suggestions/18507451-allow-editing-of-pdf-files-from-sharepoint-online

@SteveMartin 

Actually relaxing and using your voice are not mutually exclusive. It is quite possible to relax and use one's voice simultaneously.