Your Chromebook is getting native OneDrive integration in the Files app (Canary)

In the past, we created a walkthrough for getting Office 365 up and running on your Chromebook. Many businesses and schools use ChromeOS, and want access to their Office files. While using Google Docs with its new native editing is much better than it used to be, being able to access said files directly without first having to upload them to Google Drive has been something that’s been missing for years with Google’s operating system.

You could use a workaround and enable the File Picker experiment developer flag and integrate the Android app for Microsoft’s ecosystem into the Chromebook Files app, but it was there, then it wasn’t and then it was there again. Both tech giants played the blame game and couldn’t seem to figure out who was responsible for making this a reality and making it reliable.

Thankfully, ChromeOS version 116 has eradicated this hassle by offering a direct OneDrive link in your Files app, sitting pretty alongside Google Drive and other cloud services like Dropbox. To activate this newly-added feature (in Canary for now), you’ll need to make sure your Chromebook is running on ChromeOS version 116 as previously stated. Then, you need to have the developer flag chrome://flags#upload-office-to-cloud enabled.

Once you restart your device, your Chromebook will ask you to open a Microsoft Office document to complete the OneDrive integration. If you’re prompted to upload the document to Google Drive, just right-click and choose to open it via Microsoft 365 instead. Follow the setup guide, and you’ll find OneDrive finally listed in your Files app’s sidebar, right below Google Drive! Kudos to Android Police for spotting this.

What’s the user experience like? Pretty seamless, actually. Your OneDrive files will be automatically streamed and downloaded from the cloud as you access them, just like Google Drive. While this is a massive step forward, it does come with a few quirks. For starters, there’s currently no option to make some files available offline in OneDrive, which you can do with Google Drive.

Additionally, because this feature is in the experimental phase, it might not be rock-solid stable yet. You might not want to gamble with your day-to-day files until the integration is officially launched – something we currently have no timeline for. Do you use Office files right from OneDrive, or are you all in on Google Drive? Let me know in the comments!