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"4 Talking about file-format compatibility, like someone else has pointed out there's no guarantee that documents created in the online version is compatible with their desktop editors. Too bad."

Note that this isn't theoretical. I see several documents a week that render funny in online o365. Misaligned bullets, wrong font, etc. Occasionally ones that just don't work at all.

The biggest downside with Google's offering (I don't know about Zoho) is that there is no way to easily export all of your documents to an array of bytes that can be saved in another system – also known as a file.

Seriously – if you use Docs or Sheets and want to move off, you've either got to manually export everything to an interchangeable format, or just give up and leave a bunch of stuff behind.

This is a particular pain when shifting between Google accounts, or closing an account down (for example, at the end of a job.)

I don't know what specific issues you're having, but for me I can simply do a select-all in Google Drive, right click and hit Download.

After some time of processing it'll eventually give me a .zip which contains all the documents and files. Google Docs documents are exported as MS Word .docx files. I don't have any spreadsheets to hand, but I believe they're exported as .xlsx format files too.

e: I see Google Takeout also allows you to export these, too in choice of formats: https://takeout.google.com/

Yeah. It's pretty easy. Google Takeout is great.

BACK UP YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT PERIODICALLY. GOOGLE CAN AND DOES RANDOMLY DISABLE THEM WITH THEIR CHAOS MONKEY ACCOUNT THWACKER. If they detect suspicious activity -- and their algorithms aren't particularly good here -- they WILL close your account, wipe your data, and there is no support.

Fear of that is why I migrated all of my primary stuff off of Google during lockdown while I had more time.I used everything google had too at the time, even google Fi. My services are a bit more spread out now, but they are also more robust and don’t have a single catastrophic point of failure, besides my fragile body.

Ah, thanks – it sounds like it's better than when I was bitten by this (three or four years ago.)

> also known as a file

What? Visit https://drive.google.com/ and your files are there.

The parent was talking about the proprietary format of Google's Docs, Sheets, etc, which cannot be downloaded as they are.

Oh but they can, if you have google drive in your desktop you'll see that they are a .gsheets document for example.

Does the .gsheets file contain the actual data or is it just a link to an online copy?

Expand all the messages in this[^1] Google support thread, and note the comments from "Craig[^2]."

Or, even better: open a .gsheets or any .gEXT file in your favorite text editor. You'll see that they are comprised of web markup language, much like an XML doc. I don't have one in front of me atm, but I recall thinking, "it's basically XML that points one's browser to the appropriate Google app and a unique ID for the document."

[^1]: https://support.google.com/docs/thread/10078336?hl=en [^2]: https://support.google.com/docs/thread/10078336?hl=en&msgid=...

Gsheet is just a link to the online copy. It's useless as a backup.

I use rclone and it automatically downloads all of my Docs as .docx and Sheets as .xlsx.

The only pain point is that the Drive API seems to omit checksums for these types of files, so they're always downloaded even when they haven't changed.

I only have a handful of these so it's only a minor annoyance but I imagine it could get ugly if you are a heavy user.

> #1 This is 2020 and everybody's collaborating on a single doc with comments. But how do you point someone to a comment with a link? In Office 365, you can't.

Counterpoint: This is not a bug, it's the best feature of Office 365.

This is a bit of a rant, but the worst thing about Google Docs is how it encourages this terrible working pattern, where everyone wants to edit the same exact document at the same time like some kind of cursed nightmare Etherpad, without any way to reasonably handle merge conflicts, and with comments on comments on markup for lines. And every keystroke you press is logged indefinitely so you can't type anything out without everyone watching over your shoulder.

Just a personal opinion, but as a paying Office 365 subscriber, Office 365 is at it's best when it fundamentally rejects Google's workflows and offers it's own. Besides, if what you really want is Google Doc stuff, you can already buy that from Google today anyway.

The UI of it is what bugs me, as the comment boxes slide up and down the page while people are typing, so you have this annoying widget flying around and when you do want to reply to it, you've got to scroll around to try and find the thing again.

A comment/request suggestion feature sounds like a good one, but I think the way Google did it is far from ideal.

This is the reason why in Zoho Writer [1] we've put them in a neat pane on the side to show all your comments as a list. It's intuitive to jump from one comment to another, filter them and do bulk comment operations like delete-all/resolve-all.

[1] https://writer.zoho.com

> Remember for Google and Zoho, cloud based document editors was their target, right from idea to finished product. For Microsoft, it was an afterthought. And it shows.

WAS an afterthought, 5-7 years ago. Now we at Microsoft often find that the desktop version is the afterthought; see my other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24400026 ) for an example.

Is an afterthought in underlying platform design.

Typing isn't synced anywhere close to real-time, for example, and glitches abound.

It's tough to retroglue this stuff in!

Can you edit styles in Office online yet?

Microsoft pushed styles hard for so long, it still takes up a massive chunk of the ribbon menu by default, yet the online version doesn't appear to let me create or update them.

This is a fairly fundamental feature of Word. Add text, apply style. It can't do one of those.

When you have an Office 365 subscription, you can either edit using the web apps or you can work on the local apps on your computer. For the few features that the web version doesn’t support (like file comparison) you can just “open in app”.