How to open Microsoft Office documents in Chrome [Tip]

MS Office documents are not a file format widely supported by most browsers. Nevertheless, you can still open MS Office documents in Google Chrome with the Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides extension. With that you can drag and drop Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents into the Google Chrome window for further editing.

First, add the extension to the browser from the Chrome Web Store. Press the + Free button to install Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides. Drag a Word, PowerPoint or Excel document onto the Google Chrome window from Windows Explorer. That will open the document in Google Chrome as in the shot below.

Office document

You can edit the documents from the tab in the shot above. The extension includes a toolbar with a few formatting options on it. For example, press the B and I buttons on the toolbar to add some bold and italic formatting as below.

Office document2

The extension also includes six alternative fonts to add to documents. Click the drop-down list in the shot below to select another font for the document.

Office document3

In addition, there’s a bullet point options on the toolbar. Select the option circled in the shot below to add a bullet point list to the document.

Office document4

When you’ve finished editing, you can save the document. Click Save now to save the edited document. Alternatively, click File Save as Google Docs to save the document as a Google doc.

Office document5

The extension has a few hotkeys for its options. Press Ctrl + / to open the list of keyboard shortcuts shown in the shot below. Those hotkeys are largely for formatting the documents.

Office document 6

If you don’t already have MS Office, you can now open Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents in Chrome with this extension. However, note that it doesn’t currently support Publisher and Visio document formats.

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