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Google just announced a small but handy new feature for Gmail: one-click previews for Microsoft Word documents. This new features works for .doc and the more recent .docx format. Until now, Gmail's one-click preview feature only supported PDF files, PowerPoint documents and images in the TIFF format. The new preview feature for Word documents replaces the "view as HTML" option in Gmail.

As Microsoft moves into the cloud with Web-based versions of its Office suite of applications, Google has been beefing up Google Docs to stay one step ahead. The Big G has just made it much easier to share documents online through the service's online document editor, Google Docs. Previously, users who wished to share documents with others had to send a formal invitation through email, but now sharing can be as easy as sharing a link. These changes come on the heels of enhanced collaboration features which were recently added to Docs to give it more of a Google Wave feel.

As of today a federal appeals court is upholding the judgement to bar Microsoft from selling current versions of Word and Office. The question is, what does the patent actually entail? The original patent can be summarized as covering a "method and system for manipulating the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other." With this broad an abstract, it appears that the patent could affect a lot more than simple word processing. But, as with all patents, the devil is in the details.

CompareMyDocs makes it easy to compare multiple revisions of a document and to compile a final version based on these revisions. The site, which launched today, can handle Word documents and rich-text files. You simply select up to seven documents and the service will display all the differences between these in a very well-designed interface. CompareMyDocs is available free of charge.

Ever wish you had the ear of the employees who work on Microsoft Office? For all those whose work lives and breathes Office, here's your chance to make yourself heard. Two enterprising Microsoft employees have created MakeOfficeBetter.com, an unofficial outlet for ideas that will improve the world's most popular office suite.

Like the White House project that started up in March, the site is basically a clone of Digg's functionality, even if it isn't using that exact software. By logging in with your OpenID or signing up, you can submit new ideas and vote up favorites.

Come July, ThinkFree, the web office provider which first added mobile access in 2008, will unveil the only complete Office suite for the Android OS.

To date, the official Android Market has had slim pickings when it comes to document editing, with the majority of apps being simple notepads. For enterprise users, so many of whom still rely heavily on Microsoft Office, a notepad simply won't cut it.