Mountain View, California — Earlier this year, Google snapped up Quickoffice, and now the company is doing something special for those business app users. The Google enterprise team on Wednesday announced an anti-Microsoft Office play as it continues to integrate Quickoffice iPad app into the fold, as a gratis for its all Apps for Business customers. If you fit the bill, you can download the app now for free from the official Apple App Store.
Just this week, Google discontinued its support for Sync, and now it says this integration is part of its plan to make converting Office files to Google documents, or making quick edits without converting the files you have stored in Google Drive right from your iPad. As such, the company revealed it plans to release the Android and iPhone versions for free as well.
Here is how it looks:
Explaining in detail, the company said, “You have always had the option to convert documents from popular formats into Google Docs, where you can share and work together in real-time,” says Jonathan Rochelle, Director of Product Management for Google Drive. “In the past few months, we have incorporated Quickoffice conversion technology into this process so your Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files look even better when you convert them to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, respectively.”
Admittedly, the primary emphasis of this update is to inform Google Apps customers about how to convert old Microsoft Office files to Google documents and then edit them directly in Quickoffice.
The move comes as search giant is attempting to simplify the process of: “Converting old files to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides is the easiest way to share and work together, but perhaps not everyone you work with has gone Google yet. To complement what you can do with Google documents, we are also making it easier for you to make quick edits to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files without conversion,” Rochelle added.
Image Credits: (Google)
The prominent key words there are “look even better” on Google Apps products. Essentially, this is a play to compete with Windows 8 on tablets.
As a matter of fact, Google mentions that it has “more document conversion and mobile editing improvements” slated for 2013. This is to be expected, given the company’s ongoing war with Microsoft, but the free apps are certainly a nice touch.