Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Through the magic of the Play Store, the official Microsoft Office apps have arrived on Chromebooks. It has been a long journey to get here, with random individual Chromebook models gaining and losing Office support for the past year, but now, according to a report from Chrome Unboxed, the Office suite is live on all Chromebooks. You need an Office 365 subscription to actually save and edit a document, but if you're paying the $7-per-month fee, you can now fire up the apps on a Chromebook.

The Play Store on Chromebooks brings Android apps to the formerly "Web only" platform. For Microsoft Office, this means Chromebook users get the Android tablet version of Word, Excel, Outlook, and Powerpoint. Unlike nearly every other Android tablet app in existence, Microsoft's tablet apps are actually great! They offer a big-screen optimized interface that looks a lot like the Windows apps but with a smaller feature set. The Office apps are actually way better than Google's own Drive apps on a tablet, which are just stretched-out phone apps (although on Chromebooks, you'd use the Drive website.)

While most people are probably buying Chromebooks to use Google's suite of online services, having a fully offline capable copy of Office is a handy thing to have in the tool chest. If you really need to open a Word or Excel document without using Google Drive's conversion features, now you can.

It's interesting to see Microsoft offer Office support on Chromebooks, which have been threatening Windows desktop dominance for some time. Microsoft is responding to the Chromebook threat with Windows 10 S, a version of Windows that is locked down to the Windows Store. Windows Store apps—especially the new-school Universal Windows Platform apps—are more constrained than the usual Windows applications, allowing for a more managed, "app store" like experience.

With the collapse of Windows Phone, Microsoft has been more open to bringing its apps to other platforms. The company has loaded up Android with Microsoft apps, to the point that it even started selling "Microsoft Edition" Android phones in its stores. While we're sure Microsoft would rather you go the Windows 10 S route, if you're on a Chromebook, the company now has a way to reach you with Office.