Slashdot Mirror
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.
This is the reason i didn't pick google for my business, what about the customers that have processes that rely on that functionality?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you or your customers still running Office 97?
Every version of MS Office from 2000 onward supports the new XML formats if the Compatibility Pack is installed. And if you've been interacting with anyone who uses Office 2007 or above, you will probably already have been receiving documents in these formats, since that is what newer versions of Office default to when you save.
libreoffice does a hybrid PDF, that embeds the ODF file as well. so when you import it back into libreoffice everything is preserved.
Thanks. That is the first thing I thought too when I saw this topic under discussion.
.DXF.
.TXT ), may go the way of ancient languages without even the benefit of a rosetta stone.
I have been working in electronic design for many years, I started out in CAD with "Futurenet" schematic capture and PADS for PCB layout. Both ran under DOS on 386 machines ( actually the Futurenet would run on a '286 ). I had SPICE analog circuit simulators which also ran on a '286.
I still use these programs today. They are almost thirty years old. So far, I have been able to migrate them to run on the hardware I have.
A couple of months ago, I had a customer I did a design for ten years ago tell me the ADC on the board I had designed for him was no longer available, and could I re-do it to use something else? The files were still on my machine and came right up. It did not take me long to completely redesign the layout to make him a highly upgraded board with the latest parts on it, yet still be completely fit and form compatible with the existing sockets of his product. Thank goodness the PCB house still honors old Gerber formats, and I can still print my schematics off with the old AutoCad
This was exactly the thing I groused a lot about when working in the aerospace industry when we constantly ditched what we had always chasing the latest thing. What happens when existing product in the field needs support? And how long do we expect product in the field to last? If our product only lasts a year or so, go ahead and design with tools that are only viable for a few months or so... but if we are designing a product that should last a hundred years, we better use tools and record-keeping instruments that will also be usable a hundred years from now. For hundreds of years, paper and ink worked fine as a storage medium. I can't say the same for digital storage - The physical media: optical CDROMS and flash drive, may make it through - especially if we have redundant file integrity and backup systems in place - but will we have the capability to read it with all the proprietary file formats, encryption, and IP law? Anything much beyond the standard public filetypes ( i.e.
Well, I guess I am about a quarter-way into my design of a 100 year support capability. I am quite confident my CAD system will last longer than I will, if anyone else sees fit to maintain it.
The stuff I did for the Government during that same time frame is inaccessible, as the old CAD tools are now gone. I would have no idea how to resurrect the diagrams to those old RF modems that were done in the old special hardware machines. I guess it was a fortunate thing for me that when they "cleaned house", it was not only people like me that went, our old tools went too - and these were the old ones that would run under anything we could boot up into DOS.
I was able to buy the CAD system I had used for five years at the company surplus store. The software has went from running on a '286, to '386, to '486, then Pentium, and now runs in a DOS box.... I figure that no matter how sophisticated our processors get, there will always be some DOS emulator floating around, just as no matter how sophisticated our technology becomes, I should always be able to find a pencil and pad of paper - because sometimes that's exactly what you need.
( Oh, incidentally, I'll run Eagle too. )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Have you ever used Google Docs?
There is no such concept as "create documents in MS Office formats" in Google Docs; your sentence doesn't make any sense. You create a document or a spreadsheet, give it a name and that's it - exactly how or where it's saved isn't something you as the user worry about.
It only becomes necessary to worry about it when you need to get the document out of Google Docs and give it to someone else.
This isn't necessarily the end of the world because, as Google have pointed out, there is a compatibility pack available from Microsoft which allows older versions of Office to open .docx files.
There is, however, one minor issue which appears to have entirely gone over Google's head. The only time anyone's likely to use this export facility is when you're sending the document to someone outside your company and whose computers you have precisely zero control or influence over. If they don't have the compatibility pack installed, the generally accepted polite thing to do is re-send in a format they can open. It is not to ask to speak to their IT department and tell those guys how to do their job.