G Suite Gets Office Editing

The Office Watch Newsletter reports that Google's G Suite customers will soon get the ability to directly edit Microsoft Office documents from Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. This is big news for companies that have users on both platforms.

According to Google document participants will be able to use Microsoft Office or G Suite:

” … where some members of your organization use Office while others use G Suite, this ensures seamless collaboration and eliminates the need to consider or convert file types.”

They imply that real time collaboration is possible.

“Office editing brings everyone the benefits of G Suite’s real time collaboration tools and intelligence features to Office files.”

Anyone who has tried it knows that Microsoft continues to have problems with document collaboration and real-time interaction.  Getting it to work across platforms will be ‘interesting’.

If I were still working, I'd have reservations about letting anyone mess with some of my carefully crafted Word documents, so I'll be quite interested in hearing how this works in practice. Unfortunately, I won't be able to test it myself, since it's currently only rolling out to G Suite customers.