Open and save Office files on Google Drive using new plugin

Sean Michael

Google plug-in for Microsoft Office

Microsoft wants users to be in their ecosystem. They’d like people to use Office to make documents, save them onto OneDrive, and do research for them through Bing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t pick and choose which Microsoft services, or other services you’d like to use. Recently we wrote an article on how-to use Google as the default search engine in Microsoft Edge and now you can use another Google service with a Microsoft product.

Thanks to a new plug-in from Google, users can open files from Google drive in Microsoft Office, make changes, and then save them back on Google Drive. The new function makes it easier to use Google Drive while still using Office. The plug in is explained in a blog post by Google (via Engadget) and you can download it below.

There are many different cloud storage options and the decision of which one to use is difficult and sometimes made by employers, not individuals. Because of that, it’s important to be able to easily use a variety of cloud providers with tools that people are already used to such as Microsoft Office.

It’s worth noting that the comments section on the original blog post points out that this plug-in does not work in Office 2016 for Windows or Mac at this time.