How to View & Edit Office Documents Offline in Chrome Browser

Yes, we all know about all of those online web apps that can be used to view or edit Office documents. There are more than a dozen of such web apps, but they all have one requirement – you have to be online, that is, you have to have a working internet connection for them to work. But now Google has created a new extension called Office Editing for Docs, Sheets and Slides using which you can view and edit Office documents even when you are offline. In addition to letting you edit the documents from your hard disk, it can also be used to edit the document stored on the Google Drive, Gmail messages or anywhere else on the internet.

As you can guess from its name, the Office Editing for Docs, Sheets and Slides extension supports files belonging to PowerPoint presentations, Excel sheets, and Word documents. It supports both the newer file formats (docx, xlsx, pptx) and the older Office 97 formats (doc, xls, ppt). But unfortunately, it does not support the Open Office specific document files (odt, ods, odp).

After installing this extension in Chrome browser, you can simply drag and drop any of the supported Office document files on the Chrome browser window. This will instantly open the document using the extension. The interface is similar to the one offered by Google Drive. The files are automatically saved locally and you have the option to upload them to your Google Drive account.

Google Office Editing for Docs, Sheets, Slides

For the online available documents (in Google Drive, in Gmail messages, or documents downloadable from various websites), you can just click on the documents and they will be opened using this extension. You can edit them, print them or save them to Google Drive or to your hard disk.

Although there are free and full featured Office Suites like LibreOffice available, you can use the Office Editing for Docs, Sheets and Slides extension can be used to quickly edit documents both online and offline.

You can get Office Editing for Docs, Sheets and Slides extension from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/office-editing-for-docs-s/gbkeegbaiigmenfmjfclcdgdpimamgkj?hl=en.