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Google Release Drive Plugin For Microsoft Office

There’s a crazy amount of cooperation breaking out in the online office market. First Dropbox ties its cloud storage service into MS Office in April, and now Google does the same with Google Drive.

Google launched a new MS Office plugin today that lets Office for Windows users open any Word, Excel, or PowerPoint docs stored in Drive, and have any edits automagically synced with the original document in Google’s cloud when they’re done. The plugin also lets you save new docs to Google Drive, after which they can be edited  in Google’s online apps, too.

google drive plugin ms office

It has long been possible to automatically save your office docs to and from Google Drive by using the Drive app for Windows, and late last year Google updated Drive so you could launch external apps (like MS Office) when using Google Drive in your web browser.

But with this latest change, Google Drive is now going to be as accessible from inside MS Office as any other drive or folder on your network.

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TechCrunch

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Comments


Mike Hall July 21, 2015 um 7:51 pm

I know that this is going to sound naive – and I’m probably too old and set in my ways to be using computers at all – but what advantage does this offer over the current state of affairs? My Google Drive sits there in Windows Explorer and appears in any Office function when I use "Open" or "Save as" so everything ends up on Drive if I want it to, and mostly I load from the recent functions list, which will normally be a file on Drive.

Is it that the plugin saves direct to the cloud whilst I am updating the files on my hard drive and letting them then sync to the copy on the cloud? Does it do away with any need to save a copy to my PC’s hard drive (though I definitely want one there so I can still work if broadband goes down)?

Nate Hoffelder July 22, 2015 um 6:10 am

I’ll be honest: I don’t know.

I don’t have MS Office so I can’t test it myself, and everyone was talking like it was a big deal, so …


Anthony Pero August 6, 2015 um 12:45 pm

Say you are working on a document in Word. Its saved to your Drive folder on your laptop. You leave to go to a meeting, or brainstorming session, or whatever, at the local coffee shop. Your forget your laptop power supply. Your laptop dies.

Before, you could have logged in to your Drive on your buddy’s laptop, downloaded the Word doc, opened it in Word, saved the changes to his hard drive, then re-uploaded the Word doc to Google Drive. Now?

You log in to your Drive on your buddy’s computer, Open the Word doc directly from the browser in Word, and when you click save, it automatically saves it back to the cloud.

Big improvement? Nope. Little improvement? Yes. And great user interaction and user experience comes primarily from many little improvements.


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