How To Open MS Office Files In Google Suite On Windows 10
MS Office may have competition from an open source productivity suit like LibreOffice, or from Apple’s iWork suite of apps but it’s still winning. It’s still the most popular productivity suite of apps so it’s not going anywhere. You might not use it but a lot of other people do. As far as free solutions go, Google Suite is pretty good but it’s an entirely browser based solution. This means if you have a DOCX file on your desktop, you have to first upload it to Google Drive and then open it. If you want a quicker way to open MS Office files in Google Suite, you need to install a Chrome extension called Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides.
Open MS Office Files In Google Suite
Install the Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides extension from the Chrome web store. This is an official extension from Google for opening Office files in Google Suite apps. Make sure you also have the Chrome Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps installed. Once you’ve installed the extension and the apps, change the default program for opening MS Office files to Chrome.
To change the default program, right-click a DOCX file and select Open with from the context menu. This will open a list of apps that can open the file. Select Chrome if it’s listed. If it isn’t in the list, scroll to end and select the option that lets you pick other installed apps on your computer. Search for and select the Chrome.exe file.
Once you’ve selected the app, enable the ‘Always use this app to open this type of file’ option.
Double-click the DOCX file and it will open in Chrome. The extension will know that a DOCX file is supposed to open in Google Docs and that an Excel file is supposed to open in Google Sheets.
You will need to change the default app for each type of MS Office app file type. If you have to deal with both DOC and DOCX files, as well as XLS and XLSX, etc., apps, you will need to change the default app for each file type.
If you find it too tedious to change the default app this way, you can go through the Settings app. Go to the Apps group of settings. Go to the Default apps tab. Scroll down and click the Choose default apps by file type. You’ll get a long list of file extensions that you can change the default app for.
