Drive Office editing

Did you know Google Docs can edit Word files in place, without converting them? Or that you can collaborate on Excel files with dozens of users at a time without downloading them to your machine? Office Editing is a powerful feature that technically allows us to uninstall the Office suite. Even if we do not go that far, it speeds up our workflows for simpler files.

The magic of true interoperability.

The evolution of Office Editing

No longer available: The Extension

In the very old days, there was a horrifically bad editor. It was a Chrome extension that got installed for most people. When opening an Office file, you could basically adjust font size and print. It was better than nothing, but Office editing got its bad name from that simple editor.

Your company should consider blocking this extension.

Powered by Drive File Stream

For those special cases where a specific task requires you to use a Microsoft application, Drive File Stream provides something like a collective editing experience. Only one person can edit at a time - while doing so, the file is locked to prevent overwriting. When done, you can reload the file (to get the latest edits), lock it for others and edit yourself. Drive File Stream takes care of all of that. You do not need to install any plugins.

Office Editing

Since mid-2019, native Office Editing is available. Office Editing works by opening any Microsoft Office file in your corpus (a fancy word for anything you have access to: online files in Gmail, Drive).

How to use it

You can usually just double-click the file to open it. If you get shown Drive's preview mode, select the editor from Open with and you are good to go.

If you are starting from Drive, there is an Open with menu in the context menu.

Drive's preview mode. Just select "Docs" (or Sheets, Slides) to edit.

Open with in Drive's context menu.

Once the document is open, there is a little .DOCX icon after the file title, indicating that you are editing a non-Google format. That is usually all of the change that you will see. This is how the world's most convoluted editors get transformed into one of the world's most elegant, while maintaining most functionality and styling. Even Times New Roman is there.

Practical tips

Formatting

Office is not Workspace and although both are copying the others' best features, none is trying to become the other. There are (and always will be) inconsistencies, especially with very complex layouts. Try opening a newer Office document with an older version, the Mac version or the web version - not even Microsoft can maintain consistency and while there is a formatting standard, it is minimal.

When the Google editors come across a feature they cannot display, they will warn you.

Leverage commenting

Google Workspace is built around collaboration from the ground up. Comments, task assignments, replies, suggestions etc. will be stored and visible in the Office file, albeit much simpler.

Mobile editing

All of this works on mobile. You can comment on mobile, you can assign tasks on mobile, your partner can review your work while on the go. The show can go on, even if it has to stay in Office for now.

Versioning

Google Drive supports versioning. In the event that you have to email a file to someone and they return it, you can save the file (with the same name) on top of the old file. The previous file will still be available under that file's version history.

In-place editing

You no longer have to convert or create a copy of your Office file. If you are just testing, you may want to test on a copy of your sophisticated deliverable first.

Office editing is a powerful feature because it is so simple - but not enough people know about it. Here is your official encouragement to go and try it. I will follow up with a post about suggested use cases and successes we are seeing in the network. Until then, why don't you try it out for yourself? Thank you for reading!

Page updated

Report abuse