41–50 of 53 posts
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.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313105(v=office.12...
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 mai…
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.
We need a real competitor to google docs, especially the spreadsheets.
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.
.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.
.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.
.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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.