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Gmail Will Now Let You Edit Office Documents Directly From Email Attachments (theverge.com) 28

Posted by BeauHD from the natively-supported dept.
Google is making it even easier to work with Microsoft Office files, with the company now allowing users to directly edit attached Office files in Gmail, much like it already allows with Google Docs or Sheets files. The Verge reports: Now, you can directly open and edit an Office file using the Google Docs editor just by clicking on it -- just like you would a native Google Doc. But the new editing function doesn't convert Office files into Google Docs, instead preserving the original file format. Gmail will allow users to respond to the original email and include the now-updated file (still in an Office file format) without first requiring that they download and then re-attach the updated file.

Google is also working to help ensure that Office files work more smoothly in Google Docs, with the company launching a new Macro Converter add-on for Google Workspace that's designed to help users and organizations import their macros from Excel to Sheets more easily. Similarly, Google is working on adding better document orientation and image support to Google Docs, allowing for documents with both horizontally and vertically oriented pages, along with images placed behind text and watermarks (although the new image features won't be available until next year.)
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Gmail Will Now Let You Edit Office Documents Directly From Email Attachments More

Gmail Will Now Let You Edit Office Documents Directly From Email Attachments

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  • Talk about missed opportunities .... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @08:44PM (#60817986) Journal
    Google docs had such a great lead over MS-Office when it came to collaboration.

    When MS was pushing its office products, I was collaboratively editing spreadsheets for the alumni group from every corner of the globe! Forms, polls, sites ... It was fantastic and such a great feature and 45 more fonts and 85 different mail merge options buried in menus seven layers deep was horrendous.

    Then ....

    In one of the greatest fumbles of all time, Google let its advantage slip away. Microsoft added all the collaborative features in a muddled microsoft way. Sharepoint, Teams, all fighting with one another. File explorer had share point in it and it was hard to find documents, but ... it worked seamlessly with local apps. Local full installation of MS office worked. It still sucks to collaborate with large latencies across multiple timezones, but it works, good enough is good enough and that accountant who spent 3 years customizing all those 85 different mail merge options is happy too.

    Thus was the lead squandered by Google. All Google wanted to do was to put a crimp on the cash cow MS-Office, not really improve anything in office. If Google Docs was spun off as internal company with its own mission to be a player in office documents area may be it might done better. But as it stands today Google docs is greatly disappointing.

    It did not live up to its potential.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Deary, perhaps you do not understand, the only design feature of any Google product is to either spy on you to data mine you and then use the most disgusting marketing techniques to manipulate your choices. That is who Alphabet/Google is, everything else is bait, just barely good enough to trick you into biting so they can set that hook in your brain so they can ruthlessly exploit you. They are an evil corporation and make no mistake, all their customer products just barely good enough to work as bait and t

      • The free version is probably paid by ad targeting.

        There was a paid version, quite cheap for the companies, 50$ a seat per year. Our IT said it is secure and Google can't scan our documents. Did not pry. Did not what they can't. Was it a contract? A promise? Or technically impossible because the software runs in our machines on our side of the firewall.... I dont know.

        • There was a paid version, quite cheap for the companies, 50$ a seat per year.

          There is a paid version, it's called GSuite, and it's very widely-used -- so much that GSuite revenues account for around 10% of Google's revenue, maybe a bit more. And rising. That's a smallish part of Google, but huge in absolute numbers. Advertising is still the big revenue generator, at about 80% of revenue, but that's falling by a percentage point or two per year, and GSuite is a big part of the reason for the slow shift away from ads.

          Our IT said it is secure and Google can't scan our documents. Did not pry. Did not what they can't. Was it a contract? A promise? Or technically impossible because the software runs in our machines on our side of the firewall.... I dont know.

          Contractual, AFAIK. Though it's also entirely possible that Google d

          • Thanks. I did not this info. When our company had gsuite it was very good.

            As usual something happened, and the entire development was pulled out and forced to move to sharepoint.

            Our IT is not under development but comes under legal. They think losing all the cross referenced documents with dev plans, story/epic/saga testing, defect reports linked to merge requests is worth whatever feature legal wants in sharepoint.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kubajz ( 964091 )
        I partly disagree, since I doubt that Google would have the huge market share if Google search wasn't so much better than, say, Yahoo or Altavista, or if GMail with its (then) huge online storage wasn't a great email client. It just remains to be seen how the momentum of the increasingly walled garden balances against better features of competing products, and whether legislation will have any say in this balance. I have my theories but only history will tell.

    • Google Docs was dead at birth.

      It's online. It's in Google's dirty data kraken tentacles. If you do any important business over such a thing, you are either stupidly crazy or insanely stupid. I do not have to explain further, do I?

      Have fun when it comes out that Google used your company secrets to ruin your business and replace you ... right when you are offline or it's "scheduled for maintenance".

      I would have no problem with such natural selection at all. But it always ends up with my life as collateral dam

  • How about letting me edit my files in Office? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You used to let me open files from Gmail or from Google Drive directly in Office. I happily paid for "G Suite", so that you'd back up my files onto my "Google Drive"

    Then you decided to changed things around. Suddenly I could only open Word documents using your crappy "Google Docs" software. Once I realised that you'd done this deliberately, I paid for an Office 365 subscription.

    Office 365 is a poor piece of software, but I can at least open Word documents in their native program. If Google had chosen to let

  • reading and processing messages and attachments of every email sent through gmail.

  • It's already bad enough that... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tiqui ( 1024021 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @10:04PM (#60818160)

    morons with business degrees are having their employees do company business on Gmail and so on, giving Google eyes on all the internal actions in these companies including all the IP that's being worked on...

    now, these super-geniuses in the corner offices of America will probably leap at the chance to let Google actually watch as stuff is formulated and debugged, right down to the keystroke. If you ever end up in a legal fight against Google (or any of the people they are in bed with) and you have used this stuff to develop your company's IP then you can kiss the lawsuit goodbye - Google will know every detail of what you have, what loopholes exist, what other ideas you considered and prior art you might have researched... every single vulnerability you have will be recorded in their archives along with how you got to where you got.

    Same problem with stuff like "the cloud" - you have no control of your data and therefore any protections you imagine you have are a mere illusion; other people have copies of your stuff and can grant access to anybody they like, no matter what the service agreement says (since you do not have physical control of the the hardware, you do not have any way to see that the agreement is being upheld)

    People used to be more aware that, as a matter of policy, Google snoops [cnn.com] on the emails [theoutline.com] of its users [wsj.com] whenever it suits Google. The longer a thing goes on, the more likely it is to become normalized in the minds of the people who should be concerned. In this case, they've been a bad actor for so long that people have forgotten and have turned over the keys to their corporate board rooms and their engineering labs to Google. Companies that SHOULD know better and should have concerns about company and customer security are happily allowing Microsoft and Google and other tech titans (via things like Gmail, Skype, Teams, Facetime, GoToMeetings, Zoom calls, etc ) to have backdoors right into their most vital operations.

    If you do not have physical control of the platform, then you are NOT in control and you have no right to claim you are concerned about security.

    • Listen, you SJWs! Not everything you dislike is trolling, just because the person is angry, not toeing your line, and it triggers you! Get a therapy!

      OK, if you did it because he said "IP" like i.p. is not robbery, and there is no "supports organized crime" nod option, I get it. I still don't agree on abusing moderation, though. You got rejected by the NSA for lack of morals (lol), or what?

    • morons with business degrees are having their employees do company business on Gmail and so on, giving Google eyes on all the internal actions in these companies including all the IP that's being worked on..

      Exactly this. If you are using google docs your docs spreadsheets et all simply will be mined.

      So if you are doing anything at all that is deemed confidential, you are giving that confidential data directly to Google. It's not like they don't tell you that is what you are doing.

  • Specifically, Zawinski's Law. But they had a big head start since they were already starting with a mail application!

  • According to the Google support page:

    You can now edit, share, view version history, collaborate in real-time with others, and more. Changes you make will be saved to the original Microsoft Office file.
    Note: If you view but don't edit an Office file in Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides, the original Office file will not change.
    https://support.google.com/dri... [google.com]

    So that means if I receive a Word doc, edit it, and save the changes, the original attachment is gone? Can I use the document history to get the original document back?

    If they are going to allow me to change the integrity of my received emails, why not give me something I really want: the ability to delete selected attachments and keep only the attachments I want.

    ---

  • If developers didn't write their software as /applications/ instead of small parts that do one thing and do it well and can be glued together however you please.

    At least KDE has kparts. But the complexity of having to join a cult, err, I mean using a /framwork/ still ruins the thing with the same problem as above.

    I think the microkernel design pattern should be applied to *all* software. And the interfaces should be (simple + powerful =) emergent and standardized. Maybe not strings plus parsing. But more st

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      It was possible decades ago, then people realised how fucking stupid it is to turn an email client into an all singing all dancing power suite.

      Because it leads to people getting hacked senseless.

      Google have apparently not learned.

  • Maybe I'm dreaming, but I'd love it if gmail could do previews of regular text files in the same way that it displays previews of markdown (.md) files - I belong to several lists where code diffs and patches are passed about, and it's a pain to click the attachment, download it, find it in the downloads folder, read it, and then remember to delete it a month later.

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