Sync Microsoft Documents with Google Docs automatically

Update: Note that the Doc Syncer application is no longer available. It is not needed anymore, as you can install the Google Drive syncing software on your computer as well which then synchronizes documents to Google Docs for you.

If you prefer to use a Microsoft product, use the OneDrive equivalent instead. You can download the syncing client for Windows 7 and older versions of Windows, or use the integrated client of Windows 8.

Update end: Docsyncer was mentioned on the Digital Inspiration blog as a service that automatically syncs local Microsoft documents such as doc and xls files with the Google Docs web service.

This can be incredible helpful if you do use Microsoft Office and Google Docs. This can for instance be the case if you upload your Word or Excel documents to Google Docs so that you can work on them from a different computer system, or if  you want to share documents with other users online.

The application scans your computer automatically - in the Beta currently only the My Documents and Desktop folders - and syncs them with Google Docs and the Doc Syncer web service. New document versions are updated automatically which means that both the computer you are working with and Google Docs will contain the latest version of the documents.

Microsoft Office is not really needed to use Doc Syncer. If you find that Google Docs is sufficient for your editing needs you could only use that service and download files to your computer when needed. You could still use Wordpad or Open Office to edit the files locally, the syncing on the other hand is being taken care of by Doc Syncer.

The connection to Doc Syncer and Google Docs is SSL encrypted. The new Office documents such as docx aren't supported yet and give an unsupported error when trying to open them. They are however shown in the Doc Syncer interface.

I would prefer that they are either filtered or that the option to open them in Google Docs would be inactive. But this can be easily fixed before the public version will be released. The team should work on a tutorial or help file that explains the most basic steps. I was not able to find information about the update frequency as well.

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