Editing MS Documents Online

Microsoft remains the de facto standard for editable documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.  Working with MS formats, however, can be problematic if you do not have MS Office.  Fortunately, there are several solutions:

Chrome Extension for Google Docs

Google will allow you to view any MS documents, such as Word or Excel.  You can also download them, but cannot allow you to edit them directly in Google Drive.  There is, however, a fix for that.  There is a Google Chrome Extension that will allow you to edit Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents in Google Drive.  If you would like to get this extension, click here.  Make sure you are doing this using your Chrome Browser. These extensions will not work if you are accessing Google Drive from Internet Explorer or some other browser.

Creating MS Documents in Drive

If you are creating a new document you can do in Google Drive using the native Google format.  When done, you can download the document to your computer.  One of the options is to download the document as a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document.   Once downloaded you can send the document to others who need that format.

Office Online

In an earlier post, I discussed how to open up a free personal account with MS Office 365.  This can also be helpful, especially if you are already comfortable operating with the MS Office interface.  Still, it involves downloading an email attachment to your computer, then uploading it again to MS Office online.  So the process takes longer than simply using Google Docs.

LibreOffice and WordPerfect

In the offline world, there are also options that don't involve having MS Office installed on your computer.  Both LibreOffice and WordPerfect are capable of reading MS Office documents and saving in that format.  However, they do not do a perfect job.  Changing document formats sometimes messes up how the document appears.  There are also instances of document corruption.  LibreOffice seems to do a much better job with MS documents than WordPerfect, but there can be problems with both.  Also, because LibreOffice is open source, you are free to download and install it on as many computers as you like without working about licensing restrictions.