Google Docs Ditching Old Microsoft Export Formats On Oct. 1 199
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.
Re:And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs... (Score:4, Informative)
If I read the article correctly you can still create documents in MS Office formats, you just can't download them in those formats. So your customers will still be able to open the files you send them, but you may not be able to open the documents they send you.
this means that the search giant will still support exporting into these Microsoft formats: Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), and PowerPoint (.pptx).
Who cares? (Score:2, Informative)
The formats being ditched are Office 97-2003 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs... (Score:5, Informative)
libreoffice does a hybrid PDF, that embeds the ODF file as well. so when you import it back into libreoffice everything is preserved.