Google's office suite (aka Workspace), consisting of Google Docs, as well as stuff like Sheets and Slides, is pretty darn good. It gives you access to files on the go, and provides powerful collaborative editing options if you're working on something with multiple people. Many use it as a Microsoft Office replacement, and while it can fulfill that role reasonably well, Microsoft's tools still offer a few advantages. Now Google's eliminating at least one of those, with a new Workspace tweak that greatly expands offline editing capabilities.

Google is rolling out a change that lets you edit and comment on Office files within Docs, Sheets, and Slides — all offline, just the way you like it.

Since 2019, Google's suite of document-editing tools has had the ability to both edit Office documents and edit Workspace files offline (with a toggle), but for some reason, that functionality was not available for documents that were opened in Office editing mode — so if you had any offline Office documents on your hard drive and were offline, you were better off editing them in Word/Excel/PowerPoint if you needed to make any changes.

There's now no need for that; you can edit, comment, and otherwise collaborate in an Office document on Docs/Sheets/Slides while offline. Files will all be saved locally and synced with the Google Drive version once your device gets back online.

The fact that offline editing, a feature that has been around for years, wasn't available for Office files seems like an odd oversight, but it's good to see Google righting that wrong. Unless you need Microsoft Office for another reason, if you have the Google Drive desktop app, you might be able to get away with swapping Office for Google Workspace for most cases — as long as you have a browser.

You can expect to see offline editing show up for these files starting from today, but it might take a few days for it to reach everyone.