For years, people who prefer Microsoft’s office suite and cloud storage service over Google Drive were treated as second class citizens on Chromebooks. While Google Drive is tightly integrated with your Chromebook’s Files app from the start, Microsoft never even offered an official way to sync your OneDrive files on Google’s ChromeOS — you’d have to rely ona pesky workaround instead. With ChromeOS version 116, that’s finally changing. After enabling a flag, you can set up OneDrive right in the Files app, living natively alongside Google Drive and other supported cloud services.
To get started with OneDrive in the ChromeOS Files app, make sure you’re on the current release, ChromeOS version 116. The experiment is also available on beta versions, in case you’reusing a different channel on your Chromebook. You then need to enable thechrome://flags#upload-office-to-cloudflag and hit the restart button in this settings menu.
Once that’s done, you need to find a Microsoft Office document somewhere on your Chromebook and open it to set up the OneDrive integration. It’s possible your Chromebook will prompt you to upload it to Google Drive to manipulate it with its own tools. In that case, you can right-click the document and open it via Microsoft 365. Depending on whether or not you have Microsoft 365 installed already, you’re prompted to, and then the installation guide will walk you through the sign-in and setup process.
When everything is finished, you will find Microsoft OneDrive in your Files app’s sidebar, right below Google Drive. It works mostly like you would expect Google Drive to work, with your files automatically streamed and downloaded from the cloud as you go. Right now, there is no option to retain some files offline, like you can with Google Drive, but given that Google is still hiding OneDrive behind a flag, it’s possible that this will come at a later date.
Either way, the new workaround makes syncing and working with Microsoft OneDrive significantly easier on Chromebooks. You no longer have to fiddle with complicated Android-based workarounds that are taxing on your Chromebook’s battery and CPU, and you also don’t have to rely on the OneDrive website anymore, which adds additional friction if you want to move files around in the cloud or download them.
It’s not yet clear when Google will launch the new capability in stable, but given that it already works as expected for the most part, we wouldn’t be surprised if it happened soon. In the meantime, keep in mind that Google is still testing OneDrive integration at the moment, so there is always the possibility that some things break. It’s best not to rely on this for important documents that you don’t want to get lost in the ether or due to a crash.
Microsoft OneDrive has been one of the biggest holdouts when it comes to native cloud storage support on ChromeOS. Dropbox has long offered a native solution of its own via its Android app, and Drive is naturally tightly integrated with the Google OS.
