SharePoint, Google Drive & OneDrive

Keeping DreamSheets documents in the cloud storage you already use, sharing them with colleagues, and resolving a sync conflict.

If your team already keeps everything in SharePoint, Google Drive, or OneDrive, DreamSheets documents can live there too. You don't need a second place for your files.

Save into your synced folder

All three services install a desktop client that mounts your storage as an ordinary folder — OneDrive in your home directory, G:\My Drive (or ~/Google Drive) for Google, and SharePoint libraries synced through the OneDrive client.

DreamSheets writes plain files, so Save As into that folder is all it takes. Nothing to configure and nothing to connect: your provider's client syncs the .dsheet like any other document, and you get its sharing, its mobile access, and its version history for free.

Two things worth knowing:

• A .dsheet is a zip archive, so your provider re-uploads the whole file on every save rather than just the changed part. Unnoticeable for ordinary documents; worth keeping in mind for very large ones.
• Sync clients often keep files online-only until first opened. The first open of a document may pause while it downloads.

Sharing with colleagues

Sharing the folder or the file through your provider works exactly as it does for any other document — whoever has access can open it in DreamSheets.

That kind of sharing is turn-taking, though: the file syncs after each person saves. If two people have it open at once and both save, your provider can't merge them — see below.

For live co-editing, put the document in DreamSheets Cloud instead: File → Share… invites people by email, and File → Sync Changes streams everyone's edits in real time.

When your provider leaves you two copies

If two people edit the same file while offline, every sync client does the same thing: it keeps both, usually naming one something like Budget-DESKTOP-A1B2.dsheet or Budget (1).dsheet. Your provider can't merge spreadsheet contents, so it hands the decision to you.

DreamSheets can merge them. File → Merge Files… takes:

• Your copy — the one you've been working in.
• Their copy — the conflict copy your provider left behind.
• Common ancestor (optional, but get it — see below) — the last version both copies shared.

You'll get the full merge view: every difference laid out per table, tile, and chart, with row-level detail, and a choice on each one. Save Merged Copy… writes the result as a new file. Neither original is touched.

This works even for documents that have never been anywhere near a DreamSheets account — the merge matches things up by the identities stored inside the file, which survive being copied, renamed, and synced around.

Always fetch the ancestor

The third slot is optional, and skipping it costs you more than it sounds like:

• Every difference is reported as a conflict for you to decide by hand, because without the ancestor there's no way to tell which side changed.
• A row one side deleted is indistinguishable from a row the other side added. Accepting it puts a deleted row back.

With the ancestor, DreamSheets can tell the two apart, applies everything that only one side touched automatically, and asks you only about genuine collisions.

All three providers keep it for you. Open the file's version history — Version history in OneDrive and SharePoint, Manage versions in Google Drive — download the last version from before the two copies diverged, and point the third slot at it.

If the document lives in the DreamSheets cloud drive instead, you don't need any of this: it detects the conflict itself and finds the ancestor for you.

Importing straight from the web

In the web drive, the sidebar has Import from → Google Drive and OneDrive / SharePoint. Pick a file and it lands in your DreamSheets drive.

A Google Sheet comes across as a real DreamSheets document — formulas, types, and charts included, on the same import path as an uploaded .xlsx. So does an .xlsx or .csv stored in any of the three. A .dsheet you'd previously downloaded is recognised as the document it came from and offered as a new version rather than a duplicate. Anything else is stored as-is, downloadable but not openable.

This is a copy, made when you ask for it — not a link. Later edits on either side don't follow. Each import signs in through the provider's own picker, and DreamSheets only ever sees the file you selected.

What this doesn't do

DreamSheets doesn't connect to your account and sync continuously in the background — your provider's own desktop client already does that job, and does it well. What DreamSheets adds is the part your provider can't: understanding what's actually inside the file when two versions disagree.