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Google Docs Ditching Old Microsoft Export Formats(.doc, .xls, .ppt) on October 1
- niggler 14y agoWe need a real competitor to google docs, especially the spreadsheets.
- eckyptang 14y agoThere is one: Excel (Live) or Excel (Desktop). Try it if you haven't already by creating a Windows Live account and visiting http://skydrive.live.com http://skydrive.live.com and clicking the Create button at the top. You can do Word, OneNote, Excel and PowerPoint.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- gruseom 14y agoespecially the spreadsheets Can you expand on that? (I work in this space.)
- ensignavenger 14y agoGoogles ability to copy formulas across cells and automatically adjust them relative to their new postion is weak compared to Excel. Basic patterns work, but if you are doing anything complex, Google just doesn't do it. Also, Google's formating possiblities are very limited compared to Excels. I run into this limitation frequently. There are numerous other restraints I come up against with Google Sheets occasionally, but these 2 are the ones I miss almost every time I use it. I have not spent a lot of time with Excel Live, so I am not sure how well it competes.
- gruseom 14y agoIf you have any examples handy of the kinds of formula copying or formatting you're talking about, I'd love to hear them.
- brc 14y agoConditional formatting in Google Spreadsheets is hopeless to the point of not being worth trying. It needs to work on a cell by cell basis, not just column/row. And you need to be able to overload cells with more than one rule.
- eckyptang 14y agoThis kills it for me as well. Also it's incredibly slow and glitchy even on Chrome. Considering Office costs me less than 10GBP a month over 3 years, and works entirely offline, Google docs doesn't cut it.
- dredmorbius 14y agoLibreOffice. It's old-school local app though, not cloud. There are several other Free Software tools that will provide spreadsheet compatibility, Gnumeric being among my favorite. Also the KDE office suite, KOffice.
- eckyptang 14y agoI'd like LibreOffice if it wasn't so clunky. It's entirely lacking polish and quality control. It has potential, but it's not there yet.
- dredmorbius 14y agoI'll admit I pretty much only use it when I must for comparability. Otherwise my preference is plain text (vim) over word processors, awk for Excel, with lighter utilities (abiword, numeric, koffice) or specialized tool (lyx) standing in for more specific tasks.
- eckyptang 14y agoTo be honest, I too used the same toolset as you for a long time, but since Office 2007, it's just not been worth it for me. I have to share a lot of documents and information with people who don't understand the UNIX tools so it's not practical.
- niggler 14y agoI'd like to have a longer discussion on the topic with you. Check my user info and shoot me an email :)
- fafner 14y agoThey are working on a Web version called LibreOffice Online. I don't know the current state. But last year they already showed a quick demo.
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- EvanAnderson 14y agoGiven that there's no further development happening at Microsoft on the DOC, XLS, and PPT formats it's unclear to me why there's any advantage to Google, from a code maintenance standpoint, to removing these formats. If Google was having to invest labor in maintaining the export functionality I suppose I could understand, but I would think the export code is long-since debugged and working. What makes the cost of maintaining this old feature so high as to warrant its removal?
- mcpherrinm 14y agoAny changes in their own internal format would surely require maintenance of the legacy Microsoft formats, which would be quite burdensome I expect.
- brudgers 14y agoYeah, it's not as if Google could abstract or overload the export function.
- wahnfrieden 14y agoEasier said than done. As a general principle, existing features introduce maintenance and create drag when adding new features, so they better be worth it.
- brudgers 14y agoIt's easier to justify when you don't have customers, just data sources. The reason to support .xls is that lots of other software besides Microsoft office use it and thus lots of people benefit from compatibility.
- wahnfrieden 14y agoYou can still import it, you just can't export to an especially old version of .xls.
- sowhata 14y agoLife would be soooooo much easier without Microsoft's closed formats. As nice as they are, they are a royal PITA when you are not using Windows. Sometimes you just need the text and images/other embedded media, not the fonts and other window dressing. Those can be added at view time if they are truly needed.
- eckyptang 14y agoLike all those closed incredibly hidden evil standards that they publish here for interoperability? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313105(v=office.12).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313105(v=office.12...
- sowhata 14y ago.csv can be imported into Excel to make .xls. .txt can be imported into Word to make .doc. .html can be imported into either Excel or Word. .ppt? No comment. .csv, .txt and .html are much easier to work with across different operating systems.
- fafner 14y ago.csv only works for data. It doesn't work if you use any spreadsheet functionality. .txt lacks any kind of formatting. I don't know the current state of Word .html-Export. But in the past (late 90s/early 00s) it was known for being amazingly bad and using IE-extensions.
- eckyptang 14y agoIt's actually very good and always was. There were no extensions that were browser specific. These were, if you check out output out, simply commented out metadata and custom prefixed CSS rules that allowed it to be imported back into Word if required without losing any information that was lost when exporting to HTML. You could remove all these with a text editor (or a regex) and it'd knock perfectly good HTML + CSS out.
- recoiledsnake 14y agoDid they announce this previously or are they giving just a 5 day notice(only 3 working days given the weekend)? A lot of users are going to get irritated at having to change their workflow to have a copy of Office to re-save documents before uploading them. If you need to have a copy of Office around to save them in the new format, then some of the savings by using Google Apps is diminished.
- cooldeal 14y agoWelcome to the cloud, where you don't have the option of running old versions to tide through the transition and in which anything you don't control can be pulled from under your feet with little or no notice. That's the thought that goes through my mind when I hear the "Yay, cloud!" line from the following MS ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h8f5AOCNcs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h8f5AOCNcs
- Evbn 14y agoRead the article and the tryoll again.
- jlgreco 14y agoThe article as far as I can tell does not say anything about importing those formats, only that they are ending support for exporting them. How many people are both "modern" enough to be using Google Docs, but sufficiently out of date that they need to export the old formats? I am guessing sufficiently few that Google doesn't really care about them. If their copy of Office is that old, how old is their browser? Can their browser even supported by Google Docs?
- azim 14y agoBefore we get out the pitchforks, Google is still supporting the current Microsoft formats (.docx, .xlxs, .pptx). If you're still running Office 2003 or older, you can install a compatibility pack from Microsoft to support the current file formats. (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924074 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924074)
- Shooti 14y agoPlus they've since clarified that only the 97-2003 format is being dropped, export to 2003-2007 .doc .xls .ppt is still supported.
- n-gauge 14y agonooooo..... I still use word 97 on my windows 7 laptop as it does everything I need (even in 2012!). Office is just to fancy nowadays and takes up to much space - I got my word 97 install to 10 megs. Oh well - rtf it is then.
- barbs 14y agoHave you tried Open/LibreOffice? I also find the latest versions of office too flashy, and the open-source alternatives much smaller and simpler.
- mayanksinghal 14y agoAnd slow and really really buggy (and ugly, but that doesn't matter as much). I love Ubuntu but this is one thing that always require me to switch to Windows on a dual boot machine.
- MartinCron 14y agoIf Word 97 does everything that you need (and why wouldn't it?) why do you care what Google Docs does and does not support?
- hackerchic 14y agoThat makes sense. Not a lot of people still use the older microsoft office formats 97-2003. Do current Mac's and PC's still support those older formats?
- duncans 14y agoOdd, I thought one of the main reasons they bought Quickoffice was the deep knowlege these guys must've had of .DOC, .XLS etc
- fluxon 14y agoThis is a wrong move. Recentism trashes bidirectional accessibility. Stable standards are not de facto useless.
- guilloche 14y agoFinally, It is time to retire these outdated formats that bothered the world for so many years. Horay for google.
- fluxon 14y agoVery belated 2nd point: No tantrums. Yeah, Google, Marissa left. Get over it. Stop with the petulant feature gutting. Who are you trying to impress?