With half a billion users doing work in Dropbox, we’ve learned a lot about how complicated it can be to get things done. You’ve told us you need to work from everywhere, collaborate with lots of people, and use a bunch of specialized tools to bring your ideas to life. We want to make that easier—whether you work on your own, with a small team, or as part of a big company. That’s why we’re introducing new productivity tools to simplify, unify, and secure your work.
Simplifying workflows
Ideas can pop up anywhere, any time, and you need to hold on to the great ones. You shouldn’t have to worry about losing ideas on sticky notes, or spending time finding the right app to save them. We’re making it simpler than ever to capture your ideas in Dropbox:
- Scan documents in Dropbox: With document scanning, you can now use the Dropbox mobile app to capture and organize scans from whiteboards, receipts, and sketches, so your ideas are right at your fingertips. Dropbox Business users can even search inside the scans.
- Create Microsoft Office docs on mobile: If your idea is better suited to an Office doc than a napkin, you can click the new plus button to create Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files instantly from your mobile device. They’ll be saved to your Dropbox automatically. “The new plus button in the Dropbox iOS app adds a convenient way to create and save Office documents on the go, helping people work better together, wherever they are,” said Rob Howard, Director of Office Marketing at Microsoft.
- Manage photos from your computer: For Dropbox Basic users who are using their phones to capture memories alongside ideas, we’re also changing the way camera uploads works. You’ll need to connect a computer to your Dropbox account so you can better access, organize, or remove your photos and avoid running out of space.
Creating a unified workspace
To turn ideas into reality, teams need to collaborate at lightning speed. But work is everywhere—it’s in the cloud, on our desktop, in email, and spread across devices. So we’re unifying the people, files, and apps that need to work together within Dropbox:
- Share files and folders from the desktop: We’re cutting steps from sharing and saving you time with our desktop sharing experience. Now when you right-click on a file or folder in your Mac Finder or Windows Explorer, you can share right from the desktop, without redirecting to the web, or copying a link to email.
- Add comments to a specific part of a file: It can be hard to make sense of all the feedback you get within emails, chat, and text. So we’re introducing a feature that’s usually only found in design software: adding comments to a specific part of a file. Give precise feedback by highlighting a piece of text or an image anywhere within a file preview.
Keeping your data safe
Teams of all sizes need to keep files—and the ideas inside them—safe. They want to focus on making progress, instead of worrying about accidental edits or unwanted collaborators. These updates give them that peace of mind:
- Preview earlier versions: Version history is an easy way to recover old files if accidents happen, or if you just want to revisit an idea. Now you can also preview prior file versions before you restore them, so you know you’ve got the right version.
- Share with more control: Sometimes you just need to work with a select group of collaborators. Our simple, yet powerful new sharing features give you more control. Now you can share a single file with specific people, who will need to log in to see it. And with view-only access for shared folders, now available for all users, you can also let people follow along.
Get started
This is an exciting first step in making productivity simple, and there’s lots more to come. Learn more about how you can use today’s new features and improvements to get more done, here:
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