Microsoft Office and Dropbox join forces with new syncing and editing features

In an announcement today, Dropbox and Microsoft’s Office team revealed they were joining forces to offer new interoperability between the two platforms.

When the updates roll out, Office users will be able to directly open, edit and share their Dropbox files from within the Office apps.

All the changes to your documents will be synced directly to Dropbox’s cloud, and you can invite others to collaborate with you by sharing a link to your file on Dropbox.

On the other hand, you can also now directly edit Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents right from the Dropbox app, or just easily open the documents in the relevant Office app for more functionality.

It’s a surprising move from Microsoft as Office already has extensive integration with its own OneDrive platform. However, Dropbox is simply more popular. Given the growing user base of cloud-based competitors like Google Docs, it’s a smart move by the company to keep users hooked.

The companies say the updates will first be made available to Android and iOS devices over the coming weeks. Plus, Windows phone and tablet users are finally getting a Dropbox app of their own in the coming months. The Web apps won’t be updated until the first half of next year, however, so for now this is a mobile-only affair.

➤ Dropbox is in your Office [Dropbox]