Here's how to reduce clicks when opening Excel files from tickets in Google Sheets to skip the "import into Sheets" and "download after" process. After completing these steps, you can open an Excel file directly in a Sheets editor and then save it right back to Windows without importing/exporting or any of that mess.
1) Install this Chrome extension in your Chrome browser:
Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides
2) After that, you can open any Excel or Word file directly in Google Chrome and Chrome will load the Sheets/Docs editor for inline editing.
Here is a screenshot showing how this works:
Notice that it isn't auto-saved because the file is not actually being worked on inside of Google Sheets. It's being worked on, locally, in your Chrome browser. But you can easily save it back to file after you're done. If you want to move it to the cloud (Sheets or Drive online) you can do that too.
3) From here, you then should tell Windows to change the "default applications" for Excel to use Google Chrome instead.
Here are steps on how to tell Windows to do that:
Change default programs in Windows
You will want to change the default programs for both of the following Excel file extensions.
- .xls
- .xlsx
Once that happens, double-clicking on an Excel file should open in Google Chrome every time. This was a bit tricky for me to do in Windows because Windows now buries a lot of stuff, but I was able to figure out how to do it with "finding the file" and then digging around in Program Files to find the Chrome exe.
But regardless of the "default application" stuff, you can begin opening and editing locally in Chrome at any time.