Category: Microsoft Office

For long time Evernote users, the thought of leaving the service is daunting if for no other reason that the fear of losing notes and notebooks or, even worse, having to copy and paste all those notes into a new app.  That is the scenario that faced me at the beginning of this year.  As a long time Evernote user, my company standardized on Office 365, of which OneNote is a part of the suite.  In my case, I simply started using OneNote January 1st while I kept my notes in Evernote simply so I could avoid this problem.  Microsoft it seems has heard this dilemma from a lot of people and on Friday announced a new Evernote import tool for OneNote.

Microsoft has released updated versions of their Office apps Excel, Word and PowerPoint for Android today with several new features and enhancements.  The apps are starting to show up in the Google Play Store and if you have the apps installed already, you should see the updates hit your devices over the course of the next few days.  While there are some unique features to Excel and PowerPoint, all three of them have received general update that users of the suite will appreciate.

Over the course of the past month I have been in the process of trying and slowly migrating to the Google suite of Office apps:  Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides.  It started as an experiment to see if it would hold up to the compared to Office 2013, up until now, my main Office suite.  I have to say, for my work and what I need out of these applications, they work amazingly well and the transition has not been nearly as painful as I expected it would when I started this little science fair project.  In fact, it’s to the point now that I probably won’t go back for 99% of what I need to do.  Indeed this weekend I plan on uninstalling Office 2013 from my laptop because for that 1% of the time where I need something extraordinary, I can simply use Office online.

Is it the right thing to do for you?  That’s a personal decision but here is how the migration has gone for me.

This will be the first of a multi-part series I’m writing on migrating to the Google suite of Office apps.  This first part is going to cover the setup and foundation of getting your files migrated to Google Drive, setting up for offline work and using Chrome extensions.  Part 2 is going to cover Google Docs on a desktop PC, a Chromebook and the mobile apps.  Part 3 will do the same for Google Sheets while the final part will cover Google Slides.