Google supports Office documents properly

QuickOffice is no more but Google improves MS Office document support

Google has announced improvements to their direct support for Microsoft Office document formats as part of a reshuffle of their apps.

The Google apps for viewing and editing documents will be updated to include editing of Microsoft Office document formats, without conversion.

On Android devices you’ll need these free apps:

Google Docs – view/edit Word documents

Google Sheets – the Google equivalent of Excel

Google Slides – PowerPoint in the Google world.

Google Drive – to sync to/from Google’s online storage.

The QuickOffice app (which Google bought last year) will be removed soon from the Google Play store. You can continue to use it, if it’s already installed, but it won’t be updated.

We tried the latest (at 1 July 2014) Docs, Sheets and Slides apps on some Android devices with mixed results. Google Slides can certainly edit PPT/PPTX files. But Google Sheets would not even list a .xlsx file on Google Drive, let alone view or edit it. Google Docs lists doc/docx files but we can’t edit them at present.

The Chrome browser has an extension which lets you edit MS Office documents saved on Google Drive from within the browser

Until now the Google Apps only directly supported Google’s own document formats. Other formats had to be opened and converted before editing.

Once the Google apps can edit MS Office documents directly, it’ll be nice to have another option … at least until Microsoft releases Office for Android to complement Office for iPad.