Dropbox has made a useful change to the way its Paper collaboration product previews embedded documents.
Dropbox Paper, available to business and enterprise users of the popular cloud storage and collaboration service since early 2017, has been updated with improvements to the way embedded files are displayed.
The new capabilities concern the way PDF, PowerPoint and Adobe Illustrator files that are stored in Dropbox can be embedded in Paper documents.
Specifically, users can select a specific page from a multi-page document, and (if appropriate) crop a section of that page. This provides a lot of flexibility when it comes to choosing which part of the document is previewed.
According to Dropbox officials, other benefits of linking from Dropbox Paper to files stored in Dropbox include automatically keeping the Paper document up to date when related files are changed, and providing a single place for collaboration (e.g., comments on a project) even if multiple applications are being used to create and edit related documents.
Importantly, Paper lets collaborators view various types of document even if they don't have a compatible application on the device they are using at the time. Examples include Word, Pages, Google Docs, Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, Prezi, Illustrator, and Sketch. A complete list is available here.
Other features added to Dropbox Paper since its introduction include the ability to turn a document into a reusable and shareable template (e.g., for project briefs), adding captions to images (which then move with the images), identifying particular areas within images, zooming in to display an image at full resolution, and offline operation on mobile devices.
