Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Nextcloud Office.

If you’ve ever wished you could edit a Word document, a spreadsheet, or a presentation without leaving Nextcloud — that’s exactly what Nextcloud Office gives you. It integrates OnlyOffice directly into the Nextcloud interface, so everything stays on NZRT’s own infrastructure. No Microsoft Office subscription, no Google Docs, no third-party SaaS tools — just your files, in your cloud, with a full-featured office editor built right in.

Let’s start with what file types you can work with. On the document side, you’ve got the standard Word formats — docx, odt, and doc — so whether you’re coming from Microsoft Word or LibreOffice, you’re covered. For spreadsheets, you can open and edit xlsx, xls, and ods files. And if you need to work on a presentation, pptx, odp, and ppt are all supported. That covers the formats most teams will ever need.

Now let’s talk about what you can actually do inside those files. Nextcloud Office supports real-time collaboration, which means multiple people can be editing the same document at exactly the same time. You can see where everyone else’s cursor is sitting, live, as they type. That’s the co-editing feature, and it’s particularly useful when your team is spread across locations.

There’s also a comments and change tracking system built in. You can leave comments, make suggestions, and have other people review and accept or reject those changes — the same workflow you’d expect from a mature office suite. And if something goes wrong, or you just want to see what a document looked like before the last round of edits, version history has you covered. Nextcloud takes automatic snapshots before each edit session, so you’ve always got a trail to roll back to.

One more thing worth mentioning — mobile support. If you’re on a tablet and need to review or edit a document on the go, the Nextcloud mobile app gives you access to Nextcloud Office as well. So you’re not tied to a desk.

Now, NZRT has a set of standard document templates stored in the Shared Templates folder. There are four of them. First, a budget spreadsheet used by the finance team for budgeting work. Second, a Word document for legal contracts. Third, a presentation file used by the sales team for putting together proposals. And fourth, another Word document for standard operating procedures. If you’re creating any of those kinds of documents, start from the template rather than from scratch.

Let me touch briefly on how Nextcloud Office gets configured under the hood. There’s a command-line tool that Nextcloud uses for administration. To get Nextcloud Office running, you first enable an application called richdocuments — that’s the connector between Nextcloud and the OnlyOffice engine. Then you tell Nextcloud where the OnlyOffice document server is running. In NZRT’s setup, that server runs locally, and the configuration just points Nextcloud at its address. Once those two steps are done, the editor becomes available to everyone in Nextcloud automatically.

From an NZRT operations perspective, this matters because it removes the need for Microsoft Office licenses entirely. The finance agent, the sales agent, and the EDM agent all work directly in Nextcloud on budgets, proposals, and contracts. Version history means every change is tracked, giving you a clear audit trail of who edited what and when — and that matters a lot for any document with legal or financial weight.

If you want to dig deeper, there are related wiki pages on Document Management Overview, Tagging and Search, and Versioning and Trash — all of which connect to how Nextcloud Office fits into the broader document workflow at NZRT.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.