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.

And

[M0j0_j0j0]

This is the reason i didn't pick google for my business, what about the customers that have processes that rely on that functionality?

One of the nice things about open source

[dkleinsc]

You never, ever, lose a feature. At worst, the feature requires you to keep a really old version of a package around.

Why drop functionality?

[jandrese]

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.

Why?

[lilfields]

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.

Re:Why drop functionality?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

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.

Funny, this is the second time this week I've heard this question about Google. The answer is: Every time somebody makes a change to Docs, they have to test this format. Expensive? Who knows, but it is a cost.

The real question is: Why is Google running around doing all this cost cutting?

Re:And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs...

[Anonymous Coward]

I chose to use Google Docs, because it allowed at a team of us to all view and edit the same spreadsheet at the same time.

Then I wrote some Python and Perl software to automatically download the .XLS file and generate calendars based on it.

It took about a day to rewrite the programs to work with the .XLSX format -- I had to do it about two weeks ago, when Google suddenly stopped allowing us to download .XLS files.

I wish they'd continue to support .XLS files, because there are Perl modules for both reading and writing them, while there are Perl modules for only reading .XLSX files.

I also wish Google had announced this change before they made it! I had to scramble over the weekend when they broke our system.

Re:90% of the misunderstanding you mean by trollin

[obarthelemy]

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.

Re:And

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I have been saying for years that any company that runs their business on Google apps will end up either out of business, or as a division of Google.
Any company that relies on an online office tool is not a company I will be dealing with.

All this cloud crap is just the return of the mainframe.
Remember when Sun advertized "The network is the computer."? Well, it wasn't then, it isn't now, and I doubt it will be in the future.

Re:And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs...

[anubi]

Thanks. That is the first thing I thought too when I saw this topic under discussion.

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 .DXF.

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. .TXT ), may go the way of ancient languages without even the benefit of a rosetta stone.

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. )