Chromebook woes

I bought a Chromebook for my kids doing lots of online schooling activities as part of their ongoing homeschool. They often get MSword documents with teachers comments on them. I got a copy of Word for them because Google Docs doesn't handle things properly, and their teachers ask specifically for MSword documents. When they get some MSword file attached, it can be downloaded and opened. Great. I think I even figured out how to default to MSWord, but something is weird. When the MSWord opens these attachments, we can see them, but almost everything is greyed out. It's like when you open something on a normal PC from the internet and MSword asks you to click a button before you can really edit it. It seems there are some security settings which don't jump out at me when I look for them.

Any ideas?

We just use google docs and then have google export as an MSword doc.  

Exactly how are you using MS Word on the Chromebook? Did you install the Android app through the Play Store, or something else?

Using Google Docs and saving in Word format is probably the easiest option, unless you're comfortable using the Linux option that's available on modern Chromebooks.

In reply to 02Pilot :

I don't remember exactly, honestly. It's there though. Legal and purchased.

The teachers write using MSword comments, and we can't see them in Google Docs.

Well let's figure out what we're working with here. Go to the Chrome Web Store and look for MS Word - you should see either Add to Chrome or Installed. Then go to the Google Play Store (which is for Android apps) and search for it there - again, you should be able to see if it's installed or not. Let us know what you find.

I'm also a little curious about what you did to purchase and install MS Word, given that Chromebooks really don't handle software the same way as traditional operating systems.

office can be purchased and used as a cloud based service like google docs.  I'm betting that this is the only way to do it..

Weird.  I just made a word doc, saved it, then tracked changes and made some changes.  Uploaded it to google docs and it shows the tracked changes just fine (better even?).

I tracked changes in google docs, downloaded, and opened in word and that worked as well.

I should note that office @ my company is horribly out of date (2010), so maybe newer versions are not compatible?

I will show screenshots tonight when I get to the device. 

Here is an example file sent from his teacher. See how a bunch of stuff is greyed out in the bar at the top? I can see the comments, though, because I downloaded it and then opened it from MS word.

Before you ask, yes I see that it is read only. I saved a copy locally, the notice goes away, but the stuff remains greyed out.

If I just click the link, rather then downloading it and then opening it from word, it opens in a sort of online version of word, which looks OK but has no comments at all.

I think this is Google Docs "Office compatibility mode", but I cannot figure out how to modify screenshots to hide things yet, so use your imagination.

Interestingly, when I ditch Office Compatibility mode and just open it in Google Docs, it seems to work, but they have to be able to submit their assignments as word documents, and try as they might, saving from one to the other doesn't jiive.

OK, it looks like you have the Android version installed, which is really optimized for phones. Try installing the first one on the list (Word Online) and see if that works any better.