# Open a file on your office computer from your laptop

> Tesseract's Files view browses every computer you own as if its folders were local. Open, preview, edit and move files on the office iMac from home.

By The Tesseract team · published 2026-10-31 · updated 2026-11-05 · Use cases, My Computers, Files
Source: https://tesseract.dev/blog/open-files-on-your-other-computers/

It's Sunday evening, and the spring menu you need to send is on the iMac at the bakery. In Tesseract you don't drive over or start a remote session for one file. The **Files** view browses every computer you own as if its folders were on your laptop: pick the iMac under **Machines**, open the file, and edit, preview or move it from where you are.

## What you need

- Tesseract on both computers, signed in to your account.
- The other computer added to **My Computers**: there, choose **Add a computer** and use the one-time code it gives you on the other machine. The code works once, for 15 minutes.
- The other computer turned on and online. **My Computers** shows which ones are.

## 1. Pick the computer under Machines

Open **Files**. The sidebar lists your computers under **Machines**, below your favourites and usual folders. Choose the one you need and browse its folders the way you browse your own.

![Files open on the Studio iMac, with the other computers listed under Machines in the sidebar](https://app.tesseract.dev/api/core/tesseract/blog/media/7f6b5f4b2aaef8de4cf71319)

Another computer's files open in a window of their own. Your conversations stay on the computer they belong to, so looking around the iMac doesn't move your work there.

## 2. Open, preview and edit

Open a file the way you would a local one:

- **Word, Excel and PDF files** open in Tesseract for a quick edit, without another app.
- **Archives** such as zip, 7z and rar open like ordinary folders.
- **Moving files** on the iMac works from your laptop too.

## 3. Or use your own file manager

You don't have to be in Tesseract at all. On a Mac your other machines appear in **Finder**. On Windows and Linux they appear as a mounted drive.

## More ways to work across your computers

- **The same folder on both computers, all the time.** Use folder sync instead. It keeps a project folder in step in both directions and skips the files git ignores, with the newest change kept. More in [copy on one computer, paste on another](https://tesseract.dev/blog/copy-on-one-computer-paste-on-another/).
- **You need the screen, not the file.** For an app on that computer, or a dialog waiting for a click, open [Remote Desktop](https://tesseract.dev/remote-desktop/), one click from the computer's row in My Computers.
- **A machine with no screen.** A server can join My Computers from the command line, and its files show up the same way.

The [professionals page](https://tesseract.dev/professionals/) lists everything else your computers can do together.

## Try it

[Download Tesseract](https://tesseract.dev/) on both computers, add the second one in **My Computers**, then open **Files** and pick it under **Machines**.