Newest Chrome OS update offers in-browser Office document editing in beta

Chromebooks are portable and fast and help you get online quickly and easily, but they lack an important feature: the ability to natively edit Microsoft Office documents. Even though you can justify the lack of this feature on regular Chromebooks, its frustrating when when a premium device like the Chromebook Pixel is unable to edit your Office documents.

However it looks like Google is ready to solve this issue by introducing native in-browser editing for Microsoft Office documents like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The service makes use of QuickOffice technology to recognize and preserve the formatting of the Office documents. While the service is still in beta, editing Word and Excel files seem to work just fine. However PowerPoint support has still not arrived. While the services are still quite basic, we assume that the service will continue to improve over time.

Google does feature third party document viewing for some time now. However the addition of editing functionality allows Google users to be less reliant on Microsoft Office for document creation or modification.

If you have a Chromebook, its quite easy to setup Office editing.

1. Make sure you are on the Dev Channel in order to get the latest build of Chrome.
2. Navigate to chrome://flags by typing it into your URL bar.
3. Click on the “Enable document editing” entry.
4. Follow the prompt to 'Restart Now' and you should have access to the editing feature.

Have you tried out document editing on your Chromebook? Leave us a comment and let us know how it is working for you. This feature is currently not available on the Chrome web browser, but we hope it will find its way soon.

source - The Next Web | +François Beaufort