If you live and work in the Microsoft Office ecosystem but often use a Mac, here is some good news: OneDrive Files On-Demand is now available in public preview for MacOS.
Files-On Demand was one of the marquee features of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. The general idea here is you can store your files in the cloud and sync them between devices, but while they show up in your Windows Explorer and — now — MacOS Finder, those files don’t actually have to be downloaded. Instead, as the name so smartly implies, Files On-Demand only downloads them as needed, freeing up precious local storage space.
Of course, you can always opt to sync every file, too. You really don’t want to have to sync a 2 GB file over slow airplane Wi-Fi, after all.
Microsoft notes that it is committed “to the Mac as a first-class endpoint” and that it continues to invest in the platform. And these days, the Mac and Windows versions draw from the same code base and Mac updates arrive monthly.
While Files On-Demand is about more than Office, chances are that many of the users will be Office users who use the built-in OneDrive features to store their documents in the cloud.
