I recently formatted my whole hard drive and reinstalled Ubuntu to dual boot with Vista and when I started to work I noticed that I needed to open an Excel file urgently. I wasn’t at home, so I didn’t have my Office CD, nor did I have time to download Open Office (at that time Ubuntu was not yet installed). I needed to find a quick way to take a peek at that Excel file, and here’s what I did.

All you really need is your Gmail account, just create a draft and attach the file in question. Once you save the draft you can download the attachment or choose to view it online. It won’t give you the beauty of Excel 2007, but it will let you see all the data you need quickly and without the need to install anything.

It’s happened before to everyone. You’re on the go, in the mountains, no internet and you just wish you had that Google Docs documet on your destop so you could work on it. All that time wasted with nothing to do, if only you had it with you… What sort of productivity is this?!

Open Office has teamed up with Google Docs to make syncing back and forth as easy as pie (I don’t know how easy pie is, I guess it’s quite easy). All you need is Open Office and a handy extension (see bottom link) and you now have syncing, mind blowing productivity goodness. The great thing is that Open Office documents, Microsoft documents (from Open Office), Spreadsheets (even Excel) and presentations (ppt).

Of course you could do it manually already, but I found it too much of a hastle. I am actually going to change to Open Office because of this, now that Open Office comes very close features-wise I think it is worth the leap. I will update this post if some problems come up with the plugin, but you should be fine, happy syncing!

OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension from the Open Office website
Found via Lifehacker