Google lures Microsoft Officers with Docs plug-in

Google has launched a service designed to pilfer Microsoft Office users. On Monday, the search giant released Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, a service that lets Microsoft customers upload Office docs to Google's servers, so they can be edited and exchanged via Mountain View's existing Google Docs online word …

[Anonymous Coward]

No love for Libre Office?

I guess the idea is to make Google Docs an alternative to SharePoint for doc sharing (yeah, I know you can do lots of other stuff with SharePoint too) - which is interesting. If they would open it to Libre Office and if they could get the formatting consistent across all three this could be interesting.

[Michael C]

Office Web Apps

Or is it Office Live Apps now...

Anyway: Office 2010, online. No apps to install. Works in the browser. Edit, share collaborate, etc. Word Excel, PPT, OneNote, and more. Also nativly integrates with Office itself, so the more powerful editing features can be accessed with a click if you have office 2010 installed. Any doc open in Office can be saved there directly, from within office too. Editing shows up live on the web in near real time. You can even host a presentation right through the site, share folders, ad more.

Its pretty slick, and free. No Office purchase required.

Since it's full yoffice 2010 native, it not only supprots simple office functions like google docs, it supports all the fancy business features as well as the facy looking user graphics options 2010 improved on.

Gawd, reading this sounds like i work for Microsoft.... (i do NOT).

I;d only reccomend purchasing office to people who need more than a simple word processor, or worjk in a business environment that heavily uses it. I prefer other lighter apps for ordinary stuff. Even $99 is too much to spend on office for simple things. However, this being free, not a bad deal...

[Kev99]

The Illusion that is the "Cloud"

Why anyone in his right mind would want to post anything on "the Cloud" where any script kiddie could get at it is beyond me. This is another example of two things - what goes around comes around (old IBM iron in the 60's & 70's did the same thing) and a product looking for a market. Real time collaboration is not as fantastic and wonderful as the geeks would have you believe. If two people try to make any changes at the same time, the likelihood of which increases with every additional person involved, the greater the chance the document / file will get corrupted, lost, or totally FUBAR.

[Neal 5]

@No love for Libre Office?

"If they would open it to Libre Office and if they could get the formatting consistent across all three this could be interesting."

I was under the impression that this was what .PDF was all about to begin with. I'm not familiar with Libre Office, but surely it can handle the .pdf extension. Or there should at least be some sort of plugin available for the extension.

The problem would probably lie elsewhere, say with PowerPoint type presentations. Spreadsheet and Word Processor formats are fairly much compatable across many "Office" type suites. Heck, even 12 years ago, LotusSmartSuite could handle Office extensions and vice-versa, not much can have changed since then.? Maybe.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we're saying the same thing

"The problem would probably lie elsewhere, say with PowerPoint type presentations. Spreadsheet and Word Processor formats are fairly much compatable across many "Office" type suites."

"Fairly compatible" - agreed. It's when you get into trying to define an "acceptable" level of consistency (and by that I mean the content of the doc/presentation/spreadsheet showing up and working the same in one suite vs. another) that you start getting into trouble, as for many users they will not accept anything less than 100% consistency with Microsoft Office (strange IMO given the problems we've seen over the years between different versions of MS Office) but that seems to be the litmus test these days and "[my doc looks different on MS Office vs. Google Docs vs. Libre/Open Office]" complaints still seem to be somewhat common, even if the issue is majority cosmetic (formatting).

[iamapizza]

LOL

Sharepoint

[Anonymous Coward]

No thanks.

If prefer to choose with whom I share. Certainly not Google who grabs itself a perpetual right to your IP with "limitations" on that right which in the most positive presentation I'd call "fuzzy"..

Schmidt has made enough public statements to clarify his stance on my privacy and property to give his club a very wide berth..

[Bilgepipe]

Chairs

I heard a new shipment of office chairs was delivered to Redmond recently - this explains it.

[Sirius Lee]

Google offers no thought journalism! (again)

So you used to be able to upload documents to Google and now you can. Big news.

And who exactly wants their spreadsheets and text documents open to inspection by google staff? Sure, companies are going to leap at that opportunity.

"What's that Fred? There's sensitive corporate data in those sheet? That's OK, they are private on Google."

[Alan Sugar makes his customary comment]

Try as they might, until Google's products are used in large behind the corporate firewall, it will not do more than allow pub teams to get organized no matter how hard they push it. If there's money in pub teams, they are on to a winner.

I find it interesting that Google don't boast of how many spreadsheet and word documents are being created by doc users.