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Google Docs Ditching Old Microsoft Export Formats On Oct. 1
An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced a huge change for Google Apps, including its Business, Education, and Government editions. As of October 1, users will no longer have the ability to download documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in old Microsoft Office formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt)." The perils of cloud computing; LibreOffice will probably be the best conversion utility at that point. Apropos: Reader akumpf writes with an essay about the dangers of letting our data and our tools be hosted by the same provider.
is now gone. We used it at work because so many of our customers could read what we created. By requiring the strange .XML.ZIP format from Microsoft that isn't widely supported, we, like most people, will have to switch to another product if we want other people to be able to open our documents.
... I guess I'm going to have to move all my online documents to Microsoft SkyDrive then.
This is the reason i didn't pick google for my business, what about the customers that have processes that rely on that functionality?
May I be the first to say...WTF???
My company home page
I don't trust Google with my documents anyways. Who knows what they will try to do with that information!
I make it a habit of installing the free compatibility pack on my office 2003 installations to open docx and similar "new gen" documents. Works like a charm on the majority of documents.
Am I the only one who found this post misleading. TFA specifically states .xlsx .docx .pptx etc are all still going to be available.
Thus whats the big deal. See no issue dropping a format that was replaced over 5 years ago
You never, ever, lose a feature. At worst, the feature requires you to keep a really old version of a package around.
I am officially gone from
Was it expensive to maintain this functionality? It seems like the .doc format shouldn't be changing much these days, making it fairly cheap to keep around. Was the difficulty that Google is adding a bunch of features that aren't supported by those formats (doesn't seem likely?). Did they have to pay a licensing fee to Microsoft to use them? There must be a reason to remove them, simply deleting them because they're old doesn't make much sense, especially if people are still using them.
I read the internet for the articles.
Is Google intentionally trying to get out of the Office business? Because this is a quick way out. Though I use Office 2013 beta, I still save documents in .doc often because a LOT of people save in the format for backwards compatibility. Then what about existing customers that have to have this function? What a stupid move. Apple botches maps and Nano, Google botches Office, Microsoft might have botched an OS. At least Apple and Microsoft can recover the business. Office software is a tough playing field with Microsoft's behemoth.
Google Docs is only dropping support for old formats (Office 97-2007). Old applications that haven't been patched in how long? No reasonable business that requires documents should still be running on those old versions anyways. You can only keep backwards compatibility for so long before things start to get bloated and buggy.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Hey I understand trolling is fun and all, but can you change the address to one that doesn't actually exist?
I understand that the APK fellow might be a first class dickwad, but now you are acting like him.
Do you really want to be like APK?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
A clarification has been posted: it is the Office 97-2003 (not 2003-2007) formats that are being dumped, and it is
Gotta say, though, that Google takes as much care with their blog posts as they do with their products: everything is beta.
Would be interested to know what the rationale is. Did they have to pay a licensing fee for these old proprietary formats? Or did they just want to stop supporting rather old, very proprietary formats of their competitor?
Note that they also recently announced that they are dropping IE8 support soon, so they are generally being very ruthless about culling out technologies. I guess I can forgive them that - supporting lots of old MS technologies must be painful.
...... I think there is a nice place with men in white coats who would be more than happy to help you out with your problems, sir. Hell, maybe they'll let you play some "Shutter Island."
As noted in the original article: "Microsoft offers a free Compatibility Pack for Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003. If you have this pack, youâ(TM)ll be able to you open, edit, and save files using the .xxxX file formats in newer versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint."
In other words, even if you are sticking with an old version of Office because you hate the Ribbon (or love Clippy), you can still have interoperability with the documents downloaded from Google Docs.
As far as I know, importing the old formats will still be permitted. (At least that's what the documentation says.) It's just exporting that is being removed. And at this point, given the fact that everything from Office 2000 on up supports XML, there's really no good reason for anyone to be creating more documents in the legacy Office 97-2003 binary formats. Making these crappy formats read-only probably saves Google on QA, and helps hasten their well-deserved demise.
If Microsoft were to drop support for older formats today, couldn't I simply install an older version of Office to get that unsupported format?
Just seems to make sense to me, especially when I have Office 2003 installed on my Win7-64bit laptop (along with the Office format convertor to get newer format compatibility).
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
All this is is Google not supporting export of Docs in antiquated Office formats. Meaning that the docs are originally in Google's format and the option to bring them to your desktop will not allow you to pick old formats. If you had uploaded a file to Google's clouds service in whatever format you uploaded it as, it will happily download in that same format.
If you are still using old versions of Microsoft Office, consider upgrading, its time to retire your 10+ year old software, you got your money's worth out of it.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Considering that you can still put microsoft docs into google docs, this isn't a change. They're just not sending it back out into those formats - which also means converting documents which weren't microsoft docs, into microsoft docs. The issue here is relying on Microsoft products, not a fault of google's.
Google for "Alexander Peter Kowalski".
Now that MS Word utilizes OpenDocument, perhaps it can now begin to replace the .doc/.docx formats. I'm not really sure how many people use Google docs (I've heard quite a few do, I don't know how they do it), but if they have a sizable chunk of users it could work like the reverse of Microsoft's formats in the past. "Save that in .odt because everything reads .odt."
It's kind of risky on Google's part, but if they succeed they'll break Microsoft's key stranglehold on the whole text editing market. Let's face it, it's ridiculous that such a basic piece of software as MS Office not only sells at the outrageous price they have it at, but is also considered mandatory by most computer users who use their computer for actual work.
LibreOffice and its derivatives are bound to win eventually (it keeps improving and will always be free), but the process is extremely slow. It's nice to see Google attempt to cut off Word's life support, which is format lock. LibreOffice Writer is at the point where it could make Word irrelevant - LibreOffice just won't bury the Office suite until Calc catches up with Excel.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Indeed. Only that won't change because Google decide overnight to change the filters they support. What is changing is the trust we can have in online providers not swiping the carpet from under our feet overnight. See my .sig.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Gee thanks for that.
Why would a troll post as AC here and then leave a trail?
http://www.jaylittle.com/
The wedding photos made me smile.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
As someone who follows corporate strategy a bit and who is enjoying watching Apple, Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft slug it out, this is a move that makes sense. And I love to see anything that reduces the intoxication people have with Microsoft formats. Dependence on compatibility with Microsoft formats has set computing back by a decade - and the fight continues.
On the other hand, as a consumer and someone who's very wary of getting locked in, I've gotta say, that's a Dick Move. (http://dictatorshandbook.net/memes/dmb.jpg/)
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Have you heard of Trolls? They are strange creatures posting stupid, unrelated, offtopic of offensive comments in public forums such as Slashdot. Just for the sake of it. Yes, some people apparently have nothing better to do than this. For reference, this stuff is posted in every Slashdot story for a while now.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
They switched Google Docs to Google Drive earlier this week, and now my office firewall prohibits me from accessing Google Drive. It says that Google Drive is a type of "personal storage" site and it bans that category of sites.
Very Valid point.
If I was paying for this, I'd be pretty upset. (I am paying for it, just not with money).
The filters were in-hand already, and there was little point in dropping them.
Warn agains incompatibilities where necessary, but why drop them all together.?
They can still import these old formats, but can no longer turn around and export them in the same format.
That might make sense if they were adding a ton of functionality to documents in Google Docs, but it has always
seemed to me to be a pretty limited subset of what even the Older MS Office suites could do.
I can't imagine Microsoft has totally clean hands in this decision. They may have yanked any licenses Google had
for the export functionality. Forces office suite upgrades.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Microsoft would love to get rid of the older formats anyway, so I see this as a step forward. If your business is so cheap that they've avoided upgrading to 2007 or 2010, and still refused to upgrade to 2013, then they have no one to blame but themselves. Seriously, you've gotten 10+ years out of your software, so stop complaining.
I refuse to pay the M$ tax and run 97 SR-2, works fine so far. ..
Skipped all upgrades/versions in between
If you want to go "legal" and like to pay every hype as a private person, well....
There are those office shops - Depot and Max, passing by their software shelfs and looking at the price tags, quite interesting.
Then there are the feature castrated versions - Home/Student or what they are called.
Maybe Openoffice is an alternative?
First no IE 6 support, now they are dropping IE 8 and consequiently XP as only IE is enterprise grade. To now this?!
Don't give me crap that its because html 5 is so much capable. Have any of their engineers had a feal job before Google? Or are they fresh cs grads out of college? Corporate America has too much invested to just adopt and be hip without a business case on why upgrading can help raise the share price. Infact MBA wisdom shows it as an unneccesary cost that doesnt add value.
Maybe I should give the ms sales rep a call? All Google is doing is pushing these users to Office 365! Not freeing them.
http://saveie6.com/
Bear in mind that while the old formats are no longer changing, Google Docs' capabilities are. Perhaps Google is looking down the line at when they're going to add features to their online packages that aren't directly supported in the older Office formats. Office 2007+ all will warn you that you may lose functionality when saving in old formats, perhaps Google would prefer to not worry about tracking which features are compatible with the older formats to give that kind of warning.
That didn't make things very much clearer, vis a vis the GGP.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
There's been a free patch offered by MS for years so that your older Office suite can read the 2007 and later formats. At this point its rather ridiculous how many places haven't implemented the patch to deal with conversion.
Not a peril of cloud computing. This is a peril of outsourced cloud-based applications. That leaves you at the mercy of the outsourcee. If you manage the cloud application yourself (license it and deploy it on your own private or public cloud) you still control it.
Anyway, what's the big deal? Why would somebody on Google Docs need to import or export a .doc file? The .docx format has been the default since Word 2007, and MS provides filters for this format for all versions of Word back to Word 2000. So if you're sharing documents with somebody, and they can't handle .docx files, somebody needs to tell them that Bill Clinton is no longer president.
Just install it for 2003 and you can open xlsx docx etc, no problem its free from Microsoft. If they keep their software updated it was a recommended update too,
So they announce on the 25th of September that they will kill exporting to $OLDFORMAT in the 1st of October?
No matter what you think of the format as such, that is going to blindside a few users. I think changes like that should be announced at least two months ago, not five days.
C - the footgun of programming languages
http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=49115
.XSLX). This won't matter for 99% of people using Google Docs. Personally I'm really excited, I didn't know they supported the new formats at all.
They're replacing the old document formats (XLS, DOC) with the new ones (.DOCX,
Trolls Live Under Bridges and don't have clue
Thinking Roses are Blue while playing with Stinkypoo
The way I read the google decision, you can still import files in .doc format. Only you can't save it in the older version of the doc format. I am not sure what the older version is, pre 1997 or pre 2003.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Google uses our Aspose export library, which still supports old formats. It is a Google decision not Aspose!
Only thing you can't do is if you download a google doc in into a .doc file, your old pre 2003 version of MS-Word may not be able to read it correctly. That is all.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
At my workplace, the default office install on all new machines deliberately sets the default Office Save types to .doc, .xls, and .ppt because people want that compatibility when exchanging files with colleagues and coworkers around the globe. So it's not just people who haven't upgraded that want to save and create files in .doc
If this applies to Google Drive as well, I am so out of there.
Not only am I a scientist, I play one on TV
I am glad that it works "like a charm" for you on "the majority" of documents. Could you tell us what, exactly, it does for you on the minority?
I downloaded the no-cost XML converter from Microsoft for my Mac some years ago, for the excellent reason that they hadn't produced a version of Word that supported .docx yet. My experience was that at least half the time, it would run for many minutes trying to convert a document and then crash. These were not long documents, and I was never able to characterize what things about a document caused the crash. The conversions were always slow, like minutes, even when successful. And when the documents did convert, I often found that there were unacceptable formatting problems.
I found that NeoOffice--then the most appropriate Mac version of OpenOffice, was faster and more reliable at opening .docx files--and then saving them in .doc format--but it, too, often had formatting compatibility issues.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If I have people who do not have docx, xlsx, etc support, I just grant them read only access to the online doc.
Everyone else can read the newer formats with whatever Office package environment they are in.
Nonissue for me and my kin
That's a huge setback. Like it or not most offices use Microsoft Office and if I had to save that all important excel sheet on the cloud because I'd like to edit it on the go, it would be totally useless if I can't export it to a MS Office suitable format.
Are you or your customers still running Office 97?
I'm using Ubuntu Oneric w/ Libre Office 3.4.4 (which is what was distributed with it). I'm in the middle of a distance learning course so there's no way I'm about to upgrade right now.
I discovered, when attempting to modify a critical document, that this version of Libre Office could import it, edit it, and write it out. Once. But if I tried to import the modified document for another edit, Libre Office would hang. I worked around by converting the document to the Windows 97 version of .doc, which worked just fine.
If I'd had any data stored with google I'd likely have been seriously hosed. While the workaround would work, since it's a "hang on SECOND edit" bug I could easily have ended up with corrupted documents.
= = = = =
Giving people one week's notice before removing a substantial feature which may be critical for some users' processes is irresponsible. This is the kind of thing that needs months of notice for migration planning and execution. I think customers' trust in Google's services, and cloud computing in general, is about to take a substantial hit.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... so they can do what they want. It doesn't affect me.
Has anyone bothered to actually READ the ISO standard 29500 (MOOXML) covering docx and its ilk? I have.
Docx and pptx and the rest are not document formats! Their purpose, according to the ISO standard, is to carry forward doc and ppt etc documents that have associated functionality which the user doesn't want to lose when the user migrates to XML. In other words, they are temporary, transitional formats. The only real DOCUMENT format approved by the ISO for creating original office suite documents is ISO 26300, Open Document Format. Read this Groklaw article for more details: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20090427113709957
Now, we all know the history and what happened here. We know that Microsoft ramrodded 295000 through the ISO. We know that the only way the ISO would agree to allow another format is if the format did something different, hence Microsoft taking pains at the time to provide MOOXML's description as not actualy being a document format. But we also know Microsoft then set this temporary format stated to have been designed for opening legacy Microsoft documents as the default in its software, and **some** idiots the world over started using MOOXL not for its intended carry-forward purpose, but to create original documents. Which is stupid and contrary to the ISO specification.
But not everybody. So it is bizarre for Google to treat docx, pptx etc as though they are some kind of replacements for doc or ppt. They are not - although Microsoft would like you to think they are.
I recommend everybody (Google too) set their default settings for new documents to only allow the use of the only ISO-supported document format, 263000, more commonly known as ODF.
Don't be an apologist, there's no reason they couldn't just leave them in there.
Not certain how big a deal this is. Even MS Office 2013 is not fully compatible with Office 2003-2007 format documents.
I hate to say it. I ever have a certification in Google Apps. But Google the quality, and features, or everything except gmail, is just awful, and keeps getting worse.
Most folks don't yet use 2007/2010 format. Google docs served a brilliant purpose in this regard:
You create a Word doc in shiny new Office 2003 format (.doc) and send via Gmail to everyone on your
'Contacts' - before this day, any of those folks could open that on GoogleDocs, or Word, or OpenOffice.
Obviously, GoogleDocs is MUCH easier and works inline with Gmail (view, download, etc..)
Not anymore -
My proposal is to force a standard, similar to a PDF - so we can all be on the same page....
just consider the folks who have no clue what this means for them and took for granted
that it has always worked using Google - and will no longer as of October.
If ever there was a case for the beauty and simplicity of this feature - this would be it
Yet again, Google is going backwards (and should easily be able to support this functionality)
Amazing
GREAT COMMENT!!!
Hello biz-world, relying on Gmail for mail - be careful
Relying on Google Docs as your "office of choice" - October 1st is fast approacing
Relying on Gmail and GCal for EVERYTHING in your life - ONLY THE FUTURE WILL TELL!!!
"Google today announced... [that] As of October 1, users will no longer have the ability to download documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in old Microsoft Office formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt)."
Boo! Hisss!
THINK! It's patriotic
That's a nice complaint, but could you please explain to me precisely how it is relevant to Google announced removal of the option to export files from Google Docs in the legacy Microsoft Office formats while explicitly retaining existing import functionality for "Microsoft Office files of any format"?
"Read" and "export" aren't the same thing, at all.
With the growing user base its for sure that these firms does not want their users to keep shifting from one tool to other. hence this was expected to happen.
But the best part about spreadsheet usage is that, the number of options available today. Be it with new one such as GRID and COLLATEBOX or even the previous ones such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice. It just gives users to make the choice of their own.