DocumentCloud has historically offered its users the ability to upload documents in many different file formats. The latest upgrades to the DocumentCloud Beta bring this functionality to our new platform, allowing users to upload nearly any document file with ease. Whether your documents are PDFs, Microsoft Word files, text files, images, slideshows, or something else, you can now upload them to our web platform by simply dragging them into your document collection or selecting them from the upload dialog. Over 70 formats are supported, spanning document, presentation, spreadsheet, graphics, and other formats.

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Powerful, simple document conversion

PDF, or portable document format, is the de facto file format of DocumentCloud — it’s a universal way to display documents and capture the nuances contained within. When you upload non-PDF documents (e.g. Microsoft Word files) into DocumentCloud, they are processed behind the scenes and converted to PDF documents. With the new update, this happens seamlessly and is as easy as merely dragging the files you want into the upload file dialog and hitting “Begin upload.”

This fast and efficient document conversion is powered behind the scenes by LibreOffice, an established open source document editing platform. Each non-PDF document can be up to 25 MB (PDF files have a much larger size limit of 500 MB). Here is a comprehensive table of the currently supported file formats:

A need for speed

We’ve also released a number of caching and speed improvements over the past few weeks, so DocumentCloud’s interface should be more responsive and faster, particularly for searching for organizations and when conducting common queries, such as pulling up all of your own documents.

Image via Wikimedia Commons