Google Docs Ditching Old Microsoft Export Formats(.doc, .xls, .ppt) on October 1 | Hacker News Reader

Google Docs Ditching Old Microsoft Export Formats(.doc, .xls, .ppt) on October 1

thenextweb.com

84 pointscooldeal51 comments

Given 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?

Any changes in their own internal format would surely require maintenance of the legacy Microsoft formats, which would be quite burdensome I expect.

Yeah, it's not as if Google could abstract or overload the export function.

Easier said than done. As a general principle, existing features introduce maintenance and create drag when adding new features, so they better be worth it.

It'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.

You can still import it, you just can't export to an especially old version of .xls.

Just do it like Microsoft products do: big warning that you could lose new features whenever you save to the old format.

I think this is a big mistake for Google.

Also worth noting that the article has since been updated to clarify that it's only the 97-2003 format which has been dropped. Export to 2003-2007 .doc .xls and .ppt formats are still supported. Plus from the way it's phrased it seems like import from 97-2003 formats will still be supported, you just can't export them that way.

Okay, linkbait headline, then.

It was via a clarification from Google PR. The article as originally submitted was correctly reporting, as the message from Google indicated a dropping of all .doc, .xls, and .ppt format export support.

2007 Office software defaults to the new format, e.g. .docx and .xlsx

It makes more sense now, it is just a non news then.

I don't think it's that simple. For example, currently Google Docs doesn't support merged cells in tables. If they add support for that in Google Docs, it means they would need to add support for it in all of the exporters as well.

So even though the format isn't changing, the subset of the format that Google works with is.

Before 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)

Plus they've since clarified that only the 97-2003 format is being dropped, export to 2003-2007 .doc .xls .ppt is still supported.

We need a real competitor to google docs, especially the spreadsheets.

There 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 and clicking the Create button at the top. You can do Word, OneNote, Excel and PowerPoint.

especially the spreadsheets

Can you expand on that? (I work in this space.)

Googles 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.

If you have any examples handy of the kinds of formula copying or formatting you're talking about, I'd love to hear them.

Conditional 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.

This 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.

LibreOffice. 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.

I'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.

I'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.

To 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.

I'd like to have a longer discussion on the topic with you. Check my user info and shoot me an email :)

They 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.

Thanks.

I'd like to have a longer discussion on the topic with you. Check my user info and shoot me an email :)

nooooo..... 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.

Have you tried Open/LibreOffice? I also find the latest versions of office too flashy, and the open-source alternatives much smaller and simpler.

And 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.

If Word 97 does everything that you need (and why wouldn't it?) why do you care what Google Docs does and does not support?

Life 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.

Like all those closed incredibly hidden evil standards that they publish here for interoperability?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313105(v=office.12...

This is a wrong move. Recentism trashes bidirectional accessibility. Stable standards are not de facto useless.

That 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?

Finally, It is time to retire these outdated formats that bothered the world for so many years. Horay for google.

.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.

.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.

It'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.

Very belated 2nd point: No tantrums.

Yeah, Google, Marissa left. Get over it. Stop with the petulant feature gutting. Who are you trying to impress?

Odd, I thought one of the main reasons they bought Quickoffice was the deep knowlege these guys must've had of .DOC, .XLS etc

Did 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.

Welcome 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

Read the article and the tryoll again.

The 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?

You forgot to ask, how many people need to export to a specific older version format to support their colleagues or customers.

Fair point, but I am guessing the answer again is "few". Most people probably send out PDFs if the technology situation of the receiver is that rocky.

Most technical-minded people who are aware of the distinction between the various formats.

I didn't get the impression that Google Docs was only used by those. We probably won't see an outcry, though, because the people getting bitten by the change (and there are lots of smaller businesses who don't really see a need to upgrade to current Office versions) aren't that vocal on the net.

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