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.
And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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).
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't really clear in the short article, but I didn't see anything that indicated reading .doc, etc. files was unsupported. You just can't "save as .doc" something you create. If a client sends you a .doc, you can still read it, but whatever reply or edits you craft for them would have to saved in another format. I'm not a Docs user, though, so I don't know for sure.
Re: (Score:3)
It wasn't really clear in the short article
Do you mean to say Slashdot's summary? If so, you are correct. Is it rarely clear but often plain misleading or even just wrong.
Re:And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs... (Score:5, Insightful)
MS Office in JAVASCRIPT? Holy cow, I need to see that.
Wait... Are you sure there's not a few million lines of C# running on the server as well?
Re: (Score:2)
finger slipped while trying to mod up, accidently marked as redundant. My appologies.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So you're telling me there is a version of MS Office I can run in my browser offline? Please point me to it.
BTW, I have no clue what sardonic means. Did you mean sarcastic?
Re: (Score:2)
would that not make microsoft office even more easy to pirate by simply copying all of the scripts and saving them locally? I'm pretty sure it is a lot more then just javascript running on their the front end may be written in javascript bu the work is being done deep in the bowls of a microsoft server farm somewhere.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [microsoft.com] 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.
Re:And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs... (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:3)
You can still import xls, and ssconvert will convert xls to xlsx just fine.
Re: (Score:2)
Are there not Perl/Python libraries for working with OpenDocument ODS spreadsheets? That would have been a much better choice, rather than relying on a proprietary format.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but AIUI the MS "open" formats are (intentionally) very complicated.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people still use the old formats, if only because they already have lots of documents in those formats. Also because there's not much reason to change, and there are always outliers that won't handle the new formats well.
Re:And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs... (Score:5, Interesting)
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. )
Re:And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every version of MS Office from 2000 onward supports the new XML formats if the Compatibility Pack [microsoft.com] is installed
Customers send doc files and expect you to read them since almost everyone else uses Office. Sending a reply back to your clients or people at other companies saying, "Hey, install this addon and send it back in DOCX format" will only make *you* seem to be incompetent and a waster of time compared to your competition using MS Office.
You can convert the doc and xls files locally, but isn't the whole point of using Google Apps to avoid having to have a copy of Microsoft Office? If you need to purchase a copy of Office to read the old formats anyway, you might as well not go the Google Apps route at all.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No everyone has compatibility packs installed. Even if one of my customers does not have it (or one of the key people in the organization do not have it), I have to stick with older formats.
Hell, there is even a compatibility pack available for ODF file formats. Do you go ahead and assume everybody has it installed?
Re: (Score:3)
Do you mean that your customers can't read any docx or xlsx files they receive from anyone?
I really find that hard to believe. For at least the last 5 years, everyone has been sending around these new file formats... your customers must be flying blind...
Re:And 90% of the reason to use Google Docs... (Score:5, Insightful)
But many places use the docs with VB6. THAT is the problem. First, these are HUGE systems that automatically accept .doc files. Second, after VB6 Microsoft's tools went .net and working with the office formats got a lot harder... You're talking 90% rewrite.... Or buy into the mess that's Sharepoint and hope you can hire somebody to make that work.
If somebody spun up a Distro with WINE at XP level, DOC and VB6 compatibility some companies would eat that up.
Re: (Score:2)
??
What?
Document formats have precisely nothing to do with Visual Basic versions. Zero. If you're referring to reading and writing office formats by applications written in Visual Basic, they don't have any built in support for that at all - it's all third party code.
Re: (Score:2)
Incompatible w/Libre Office? (Score:2)
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 docum
90% of the misunderstanding you mean by trolling? (Score:3)
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.
Re:90% of the misunderstanding you mean by trollin (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
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 limi
Re: (Score:2)
ever heard of PDF?
Re: (Score:2)
ever heard of PDF?
Pretty hard to modify for people that work collaboritivly.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
What, none of your customers can read .docx, .xlsx, or .pptx? These have been the default since Office 2007. And earlier versions (back to Office 2000) can handle them with a simple filter upgrade.
Re: (Score:2)
Keep copies of your old software. I needed to recover some family history letters that was saved in Microsoft Works format for Windows 3.1 that was on floppy. To recover them, I built a Win 3.1 machine to run Star Office (legal copy saved with book and box) so I opened the files in Star Office with the import function to save formatting and then saved them in MS Word 97 format. From there I could transfer them off floppies. (Win3.1 does not support USB) Keep some older hardware handy.
With the software c
And (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the reason i didn't pick google for my business, what about the customers that have processes that rely on that functionality?
Re:And (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep! This just doesn't make sense. Google continues to be *the example* against anything and all things "cloud".
Re: (Score:2)
Never before have there been forced upgrades or features dropped from applications! Outrage!
Re:And (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not the drop, is the time-frame. like i wrote below
The problem is they announce a functionality drop 1st October on the 26th of September.
Re: (Score:3)
i think people would say the difference is that you aren't forced to upgrade a local app, but google docs can just change over night. there's no option to not upgrade.
Re: (Score:3)
Forcing updates is bad enough
Dropping features is bad enough
Combining the two is horrible behaviour
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is not that they are dropping a feature.. that's fine. The problem is the time frame. Here's the announcement on 9/25 announcing the change:
http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.ca/2012/09/scheduled-release-track-features-update_26.html [blogspot.ca]
They gave people 6 fucking days to fix any processes that rely on that functionality.
I don't care that they have dropped support for it. But 6 days?!
You really don't see a problem with that?
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry.. I got that wrong.. They scheduled it on 9/25, but then sat on their hands before actually making the announcement on 9/26. So make that 5 days.
Too fucking lazy to give people a 6th day.
Re: (Score:3)
Never before have there been forced upgrades or features dropped from applications! Outrage!
Yeah but at least in non-cloud environments you can keep running the software as-is.
Re: (Score:3)
It's actually remarkably rare.
There are upgrades that rapidly become difficult to live without (eg. when Microsoft were changing their file format subtly with every version of Office up to '97), there are upgrades that you'd be well advised not to ignore (eg. when an old piece of software is a piece of chicken wire security wise and the developers decide they're not going to patch any more holes that show up in it), there are vertical markets where they don't force you to upgrade but they jack up the price
Re: (Score:2)
I know right? It's not like there is a free compatibility [microsoft.com] pack or anything
Re:And (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:3)
All this cloud crap is just the return of the mainframe.
No, it's not. With a mainframe, it's your data on your disks attached to your mainframe managed by your software.
In the cloud, it's your data on their servers, sometimes managed by their software, according to their Terms of Service and mined for their benefit.
Not remotely close.
Re: (Score:2)
No need really (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, need, really. (Score:2)
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 wh
Who cares? (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Clickbait, in its more raw form. Worse, people voted it up to get here in the first place.
Re: (Score:3)
I save all my Office documents in the old format - .doc, .ppt, .xls. I do that for two reasons: backwards compatibility, which matters to some of my colleagues and international collaborators, and compatibility with the version of Office I have at home.
I guess there are more people like me, that need to cooperate with people around the world, and cannot expect that everyone has paid the Microsoft tax recently.
Re: (Score:2)
> I save all my Office documents in the old format - .doc, .ppt, .xls. I do that for two reasons: backwards compatibility, which matters to some of my colleagues and international collaborators, and compatibility with the version of Office I have at home.
You can get converters for all supported Office versions. And obviously you should not run an unsupported Office version if you exchange documents.
LibreOffice may be a better reason: it is ok with the old document format up to a point, but it really stru
One of the nice things about open source (Score:5, Interesting)
You never, ever, lose a feature. At worst, the feature requires you to keep a really old version of a package around.
doesn't this also apply to closed source? (Score:2)
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).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you want Gnome 2, you can get it here:
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/desktop/2.91/2.91.2/sources/ [gnome.org]
Yes, building it is a pain in the butt, but you can do it.
Re: (Score:2)
You try running Amarok 1.4 on a modern Linux distro.
As much as it saddens me, yes, sometimes you do lose features with open source software.
Re: (Score:2)
So run an old kernel.
The code is still available, feel free.
Why drop functionality? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why drop functionality? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 don't think there's a license fee. If there was, MS would have tried to go after the open-source implementations at some point in the past. In fact, I believe that a couple years ago, the European Union required MS to release documentation on their legacy binary Office formats to the public.
What this is about, I suspect, is QA costs. Having these export formats means that every time substantial changes are made, the legacy export features must be tested. And they have to be tested with a substantial variety of documents to make sure nothing breaks, if Google wants to provide a solid experience. (Businesses would be very unhappy if they exported a PPT and the slides were all messed up because, say, one particular type of vector image wasn't properly ported back to legacy mode.) So Google can't just leave it in, since it might break at any time in the future, and as long as it stays in, it will suck up time and effort that could be spent on more important things. They decided that with everything from Office 2000 on up supporting the XML formats, it was time to pull the plug on legacy export. (Legacy import, AFAIK, should continue unaffected.)
Re:Why drop functionality? (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Only OLD format, not current (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is they announce a functionality drop 1st October on the 26th of September.
Re: (Score:2)
Office 2003, the last version that used .doc as the native format, will have extended support (security fixes) through till April 8, 2014.
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:The formats being ditched are Office 97-2003 (Score:4, Insightful)
The *ahem* awesome bar. 'Nuff said.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> Interesting as my multi-national (70k +) corp still runs Office 2003
And why exactly would they do that? Office 2010 is so much more functional, and a lot easier to use to. Word may not have changed all that much, but it has a new GUI and a good equation editor. PowerPoint has changed massively, from an ugly program to complete the package to something actually quite useful.
I understand that you may want to wait with updates, and not do every version. But since Office 2010 has SP1, there is really no re
Re: (Score:3)
Word may not have changed all that much, but it has a new GUI
Best reason I can think of NOT to upgrade. Change for increased functionality is a good thing, change for the sake of change is brain-dead stupid, it only slows down your workflow and decreases productivity.
Office 2010 is so much more functional, and a lot easier to use to
Um, trying to parse past your typo. Did you mean "a lot easier to use, too" or "a lot easier to get use to"? But at any rate, I keep hearing the same thing from MS fans and alway
Could Work Out (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Reducing Office suites to text editing is ridiculous. For most people in an office setting, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are utterly core technologies, and spending a few hundred dollars per seat is a complete non-factor for any medium to large business.
If Unix ran MS-Office, I that many businesses would find it easier to switch away from Windows but still keep Office.
Re: (Score:2)
Math equations are TeX's ballbark, not Powerpoint's. Impress does seem like it's the unfinished work of a single person scratching an itch over a single weekend though. I tried to use it once with my son for his "create a presentation in powerpoint" homework;
Great move, Google (Score:2)
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://dicta [dictatorshandbook.net]
Peril (Score:2, Insightful)
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 y
Awfully short notice (Score:2)
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.
Guys export TO .doc is out, not import. (Score:2)
Terminology confusion. Import = upload. Export=dow (Score:2)
Meh (Score:2)
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
Google docs just gets worse, and worse (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Google for "Alexander Peter Kowalski".
Re: (Score:2)
Why would a troll post as AC here and then leave a trail?
http://www.jaylittle.com/
The wedding photos made me smile.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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?
Re:I dont trust Google with my documents (Score:4, Funny)
I don't trust Google with my documents anyways. Who knows what they will try to do with that information!
Display relevant ads?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe, but I'll be the one deciding to upgrade, not google.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)