New Plug-In Brings Google Drive to Microsoft Office

New Plug-In Brings Google Drive to Microsoft Office

Google Drive and Microsoft Office are playing nice.

A new Google Drive plug-in, announced Tuesday, lets you open any Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents you have stored in Drive right from Office for Windows, and save any changes back to Drive when you're done. If you're working on a document, spreadsheet, or presentation on your computer, the extension lets you easily save that file to Drive, right from the Office app.

"This is especially useful for sharing files with teams, or for accessing your files across devices," Google Drive plug-in technical program manager Darrell Kuhn wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

Cloud-storage service Dropbox and Box already offer similar integrations with Microsoft Office Online.

The new tool comes after Google in November launched a Chrome extension that lets you launch certain desktop apps, like Adobe Photoshop, right from Google Drive. The new extension builds upon this approach, offering this same functionality with Office.

"With Google Drive, you can keep all your important files in one place, then open them with your choice of apps and devices," Kuhn wrote on Tuesday. "With this plug-in, you can use the apps you're already comfortable with, while benefitting from the security and convenience of Google Drive."

Meanwhile on the cloud-storage front, Google this week also announced plans to shut down Google+ Photos on Aug. 1. The Web giant wants people to transition over to its new Photos service instead. If you don't update to Photos, Google+ Photos on Android will soon stop working but your images and videos will "remain safely stored and available" via photos.google.com or for export using Google Takeout.