The Google domination of all things online continues, as they announced that you can now open and edit all Microsoft® Word files that you receive as attachments in Gmail.

From the Google blog: “You can now view them with a single click — no need to download, save, and open files with a desktop application when you just want read them. The Google Docs viewer that allows you to view .pdf, .ppt, and .tiff files in your browser now supports .doc and .docx formats too.”

All you have to do is click the “View” link at the bottom of your Gmail, and you can edit the file by clicking “Edit online.”

So now that you can use Excel, Word, and Powerpoint online through Google Docs, do you even need to buy MS office anymore? For the fairly simple tasks that real estate agents and brokers perform everyday, what functions does the desktop version of office provide that the Google cloud doesn’t?