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ODF Support In Google Drive
An anonymous reader writes: Google's Chris DiBona told a London conference last week that ODF support was coming next year, but today the Google Drive team unexpectedly launched support for all three of the main variants — including long-absent Presentation files. You can now simply open ODT, ODS and ODP files in Drive with no fuss. It lacks support for comments and changes but at least it shows progress towards full support of the international document standard, something conspicuously missing for many years.
Professors, that's who...
People who are working on the same content, and doing revisions in cycle, writing a book chapter... (I just did this Monday)
Git/etc do NOT work for the type of work you do editing papers/books/etc
Great.. I heard of this. I can't really say I've ever seen it.
Apple iWork doesn't have it. The only office format which seems to be standard appears to me Microsoft's and PDF and PDF isn't really a great editing format.
I recently used LibreOffice and OpenOffice and I was just absolutely amazed at how bad they were. Don't get me wrong, they had gobs of features, they just didn't work well with Windows or Mac and had truly horrible cut and paste support.
Example, open a PDF file in Acrobat Reader. Copy a section of text (no images) and paste it into LibreOffice. Then select an image and try to paste it in. I can't for the life of me figure out how to insert the image where I want it instead of automatically creating an extra column and having to press enter a bunch of times and manually flow my text past the image.
It's just absolute shit. Even WordPerfect gets that one right.
I just uploaded an ODT file that has two columns on a single page.
GDrive, by default, converts it and removes the column formatting.
Still not as good as OneDrive then.
Shame on you Google.
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
I have been wishing for ODF support in Google Docs since forever. This one feature is what makes it now really feasible for me to start using the Google office tools - becauses I can then open the documents with a myriad other suites that work with ODF!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Did they finally fix exporting as ODF?
Why did it take so long in the first place?
"Features and services may be introduced and withdrawn without notice. Good luck relying on any of them at home or work."
Google went about it strategically. First it peeled of the low hanging fruit, people who don't need all the bells and whistles of a full suite with Google docs/apps. Then it leveraged the central server doing the edits, to create a collaborative edit features that were well ahead of MsOffice when it was introduced. Priced it cheap, pitched it to the enterprises. When it was forcing Microsoft to scramble to offer collaboration tools, Apple helped in the upgrade tread mill battle. In an earlier era, the top exec gets the latest and greatest laptop every six months with latest Office pre-installed and starts belting out documents in the latest format. IT will upgrade rest of the corp. But Apple took all the top execs with its iPad, and now PC is not the latest toy these top honchos were getting. Side effect: The corporate upgrade treadmill slowed down significantly.
Now it is going for the last section that really needs all the bells and whistles of a full fledged office suite. Instead of spending the money to reinvent the wheel inside google docs, it is just using the well established code base of OpenOffice and the ODF. Even though Microsoft lost the mind share and the market share in percentage terms, its cash cows were producing milk at the same old prodigal rate. Cutting off a significant portion of the MsOffice revenue stream is important for Google's business ops in other spheres. Else Microsoft will under cut it. It even tried to pay people to use Bing.
Google does not really want to make much money off its google docs franchise. It uses it just to crimp the revenue stream of Microsoft. It is making money elsewhere.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In a word: no. A colleague who knows I prefer LibreOffice thought he was being helpful by sending me a presentation for review in odp format. He'd created and saved it in Powerpoint.
Guess what? LibreOffice can't make any sense of it. Google Docs can't make any sense of it. But Powerpoint doesn't have a problem with it. If I open it with an archive manager it seems to have the right kind of structure, but the content xml file is so full of boilerplate (font definitions and other crap) that I can't actually find the content. I have to assume the file is some proprietary version of ODP that only Powerpoint understands.
This is so Google can "read' more content and deliver more ads, gather more "intel" on users. I'm not a troll, BTW. I'm a guy who is concerned about the rapid and ridiculous surrender of data to third parties who will and are turning it over to whomever hands them a warrant. Innocent people get caught up in these dragnets.
Kids, keep your data under your own control. You'll thank yourself later. I promise.
I do not yet see the functionality in Google Drive. In the "new" layout, there is no option to open an .odt, .ods, .odp file with the Google products Docs, Sheets, Slides. In the "old" layout of Google Drive, I can open the file, but it makes a copy of the file rather than editing the ODF based file. So it looks like I would not be able to edit the same file with the Google tools, then move to a laptop and use LibreOffice on the same file via Google Drive.
In place ODF editing not there yet for me...
Zoho Docs has supported ODT for some time. It's sad so few know about it. Their app Zoho Writer even supports editing ODT on android (and perhaps other platforms?). I was amazed when I stumbled on this functionality entirely by accident. The Zoho Writer app also supports opening files from Google Drive and Dropbox... so technically you could say that it supports editing ODT on those platforms as well.
Furthermore, Zoho has a desktop file sync client that supports Linux, unlike Google who has has seemingly utterly failed to provide a linux client despite promising it when Drive launched.
Way too little, way too late from Google, as far as I'm concerned.
(My documents are fairly simple, so I'm not sure how technically complete the ODT support is. But it's worked for me.)
This is excellent news. It's absurd that so many typical documents are stuck in proprietary formats. As stuff changes we should be able to read older documents using any tool we'd like. This is a major step along the way; there are now even more systems that support open document format. Congrats to Google!
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Not by one helluva long shot.
I was excited about google docs at one point. I even got certified in google apps. I thought there was real potential.
But google has proved, over, and over again, that if something is not directly connected to it's ad revenue, it is put on a distant back burner.
Google docs suck. The syncing is horrid. There is no client for Linux. Dropbox, and Evernote, work much *much* better. There are serious bugs that have been around for years, but Google still has not fixed them. There is no real support. Even the document searching sucks.
If google hopes to compete with an entrenched leader, like MS, google must do *much* better.
MS is much more strategic. MS started selling office for $10 though it's HUP program. MS created a cloud service. MS rigged OOXML being called an ISO standard.
What would a lazy slashdot post be without a few unexplained acronyms?
Next up, support for PQZ, RUO, U89, and VUI files!
What business of a storage medium is it to tell documents what format they can be?
We wouldn't accept it if a usb stick refused to work with autocad files. How is this different?
I store all sorts of gunk on Google Drive and I don't expect it to 'support' or not 'support' it. I just expect it to hang onto it.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Yea, and LaTeX is just a weird spelling for a type of rubber
Google's support for critical open source infrastructure like Libreoffice has in general been pathetic. Much of the blame for that would appear to lie with that same Chris Dibona.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
My S&P400 company gives us all both MsOffice and Google docs. Free to use whatever we want. I see Google docs being preferred over MsOffice for almost all the documents. Some fancy presentations with animations is the only time people fire up MsOffice. Send a link to all, and they get the most updated version of the document, don't have to bother working through comments and change history and emailing docs back and forth. Almost all the corporate back office forms are google spreadsheets now. All team leads directly post their budget proposals for the next year and it all gets consolidated and gets reported to admin.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact