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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
.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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
