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How do I use Microsoft Word to open a Google Drive cloud document?

How can I open a doc with MS Word/Excel in Google Drive via right-click?

  • At work we use Microsoft Office to create documents and Google Drive to store them. One of my coworkers has Drive set up so that when she right-clicks on a stored document, she is given the option to open it with Word, and the same is true of spreadsheets/Excel. I cannot figure out how to set this up so that I have the same options, and she can't remember how she got it to work that way. Any idea? In the right-click options menu in Drive, there is an option to + connect more apps, but Microsoft Office products are not among the apps I can see to add. All of this is true whether I'm using my Mac or my PC, Firefox, Safari, or Chrome, and my versions of Office are current. Any idea how I can connect MS Office and Google Drive so that I can have what she has?

  • Answer:

    We both use the UI (we also both have the app downloaded to our machines, but you can't right click on docs when using the app, except to copy the URL, that I'm aware of). But for the purpose of this question, I'm talking about the UI. O hai, coworker.

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is this in the google UI, or does she have the google drive mapped to a local folder on her machine ? If in the browser, what browser is she using - IE, Chrome, FF ?

k5.user

Are you certain she's using the web interface? Does she have the desktop version of Google Drive? (There's an icon in your system tray that you can right click and it stores files on your machine and syncs it.)

typecloud

Hi, I'm the coworker she's talking about. I have the desktop version of Google Drive but also have the option to open Word docs through the web interface.

smich

Here's a http://tinypic.com/r/33z5gqs/8 of my web interface for Google Drive.

smich

I did an experiment in the UI: (1) Opened Google Drive - saw that I had some Google Doc word files, and some actual Office word files. (2) Right click in both cases did not allow opening with MS Word. (3) Installed the desktop version. (4) Opened Google Drive in both Chrome and IE - still right click did not allow opening with MS Word. (5) After a couple of minutes, Google Drive asked to install a browser extension... called Application Launcher for Google Drive (by Google). Once done, then ONLY IN CHROME, right click now allows opening with MS Word, and ONLY FOR ACTUAL WORD DOCS (with the "W" icon) (not for Google Doc word files). So, I think it's the combo of having the desktop version of Drive, using Chrome, and trying with actual MS Word documents.

blue_wardrobe

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