Not much. Always something. Mostly good.

Tid Bits: Opening Microsoft Office Documents from Google Drive in Chrome

Update 2018-09-22 I've separated the instructions for opening Word from Drive, and opening Drive documents from Word.

Solution

Open Word from Drive

  1. Install Google Backup and Sync (previously Google Drive) on your PC.
  2. Install the Chrome extension Application Launcher for Drive (by Google)

That's it! You should now be able to right-click a Word document in the Drive web app and choose Open With Word.

Open Drive Document from Word

  1. Download and install the plugin Google Drive for Office Plugin
  2. Close all Office docs, then open Word and follow the prompts to connect to Drive.

Drive will now be an an Open/Save option in Word.

Bonus Option - Office Editing Extension

While I don't recommend it, you can also edit your Microsoft Office documents from drive using a Google extension: Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides

I don't like this because it's not native Office editing, so there will likely be compatibility problems. I think what this extension does is temporarily convert the Office document to a Google Doc for edtiing, then convert back to the Office format.

Background

Google really wants you to use their Docs suite, so much so that their default option for editing a Word document is "Google Docs."

But this doesn't open your Word document for editing. It converts the document to a Google Text document. So now, you have two:

This quickly leads to "copy madness," where you end up with two, three or a dozen copies as you try to save your changes to Word. You might think you could send someone the file on in your file system:

Do Not Do This! If you open that .gdoc file in a text editor, you'll see it's just a link to the online file. You can only edit a Google Doc in the browser.

{"url": "https://docs.google.com/open?id=1WsdFxt7qcUiy0ikB-gNV2U4ZoOQ8_OsDEAtIOBesVpg", "doc_id": "1WsdFxt7qcUiy0ikB-gNV2U4ZoOQ8_OsDEAtIOBesVpg", "email": "my@email.net"}

References

How to edit Microsoft Office documents stored on Google Drive - TechRepublic

QuickReview-Android Weather Apps

X-Men, Halle Berry as "Storm"

EDIT: I gave AccuWeather a fair chance, but I have to downgrade the widget because it doesn't automatically refresh. I'm baffled by that. Who wouldn't want the weather info on a home screen to be reasonably current? Who would instead want to be forced to manually refresh it by tapping a very small area of the widget?


There are, by my count, 1.3 bazillion weather apps for Android. I've been using 1Weather because it seems to work well and I really like the widget. However, my wife uses Weather Underground (which, ironically, I recommended) and we sometimes get different temperature reports. So, I decided to look at the top apps again.

Searching Google for "most accurate android weather apps" yielded no site that spoke to accuracy. I guess that's to be expected. Who watches the watchmen?

What matters to me is:

  1. A good widget, showing lots of info in a 4x1 grid.
  2. A good app, easy to comprehend.
  3. Limited advertising (and I might buy it).

Below is a matrix of what I found. It's opinionated, and brief, but might help someone other than me. I've switched to AccuWeather because of a couple of sweet features. But...1Weather still has the best widget.

App Price Widget 1-5 Usage 1-5 Sum Rank Comments
1Weather F/$2 5 5 10 1 All around really good.
Weather Underground F/$2 4 5 9 2 Widget not resizable (in Now launcher).
Today Weather F/$4 3 5 8 3 Beautiful app, but no widget I like. Best settings. I really wanted this to be #1
AccuWeather F/$4 2 5 7 4 Widget doesn't auto-refresh. That's a deal-breaker. MinuteCast is great! Prepare Your Day sweet
Dark Sky F/$3y n/a 4 4 5 Widgets only w/subscription. Time Machine sweet.
Weather forecast SP F/$4 2 4 6 6 Pretty. Note both WF apps are effectively the same.
Weather forecast GA F/$4 2 4 6 7 No 4x1 widget. Pretty app.
The Weather Channel F 2 3 5 8 Lots of info. No remove ads. Limited settings.
WeatherBug F/$10 1 2 3 9 Yuck. Ugly, separate download for good widgets, paid version is expensive

Tid Bits: Google Backup and Sync Can't Sync Error - Check File Ownership

I use Google' Backup and Sync to synchronize a lot of files, so some problems are--I guess--inevitable. Here's how to fix a common one.

Right-click > Properties > Security

Advanced

Change owner to yourself. It doesn't seem to work to change to anything else.

Apply and close everything

This is generally all it takes to allow Backup and Sync to continue. However, you may want to compare the file permissions to other files and take other actions.

  • 'Allow Inheritance', AND/OR
  • 'Replace child object permissions' from the parent folder (I like doing this one)