How to Integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs and SkyDrive

OpenOffice is one of the most popular office suites. It is an effective free replacement for Microsoft Office. On the other hand, Google Docs is an online Office suite that lets you store documents online for free, and edit them online.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could directly integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs, so that you can use the familiar interface of OpenOffice to create and edit documents, and then store them in Google Docs. This gives you added advantage of accessing your documents from anywhere.

We have already covered how to integrate Microsoft Office with Google Docs, and how to integrate Microsoft Outlook with Google Docs. Now, here is a nice free software that lets you integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs.

This uses a free plugin for OpenOffice called MultiCloud File Manager, and . You just need to download the zip file, and install this extension to your OpenOffice. This will install some additional icons to your OpenOffice.

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Next step is to create a free account with a corresponding web application called SMEStorage. These are the guys behind MultiCloud File Manager plugin, and provide the service to upload your OpenOffice documents to Google Docs.

After installing plugin, and creating free account, you can easily save the documents to Google Docs account. You can choose to convert documents to Google Docs compatible format while uploading documents, or leave them in the OpenOffice format.

If you choose to convert to Google Docs format, you get the advantage that you can open the documents in Google docs directly, and edit them there. However, you might lose some of the formatting features that are not compatible with Google docs.

On the other hand, if you choose to use Google docs just as storage, you can store the document in exact format in Google Docs, but you will not be edit that online.

Apart from Google Docs, you can use this service to store OpenOffice docs to other online cloud services as well, such as, SkyDrive, Amazon S3, RackSpace Cloud Files, Box.Net, Gmail, Microsoft Live Mesh, and more.

I find the options of SkyDrive, and Gmail  most exciting. So, you can easily store your OpenOffice documents in SkyDrive and Gmail, and then access them from anywhere.

MultiCloud File Manager plugin is one of the most useful plugin for OpenOffice that I have come across. It makes the process of integrating OpenOffice and Google Docs extremely simple. Absolutely love it!

Another good software to use SkyDrive effectively is SDExplorer.

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