Google rewrites dot-doc death note Google’s plan to give old Microsoft Office file formats a quiet bullet behind the woodpile seems to have fallen by the wayside, with Mountain View quietly revising its feature announcement. Google's original announcement stated: The following features are intended for release to these domains on October 1st: Docs: Users no …
Why would you say they changed their minds?
The first announcement said they will no longer support *DOWNLOADING* old MS Office formats, so does the second.
They only re-worded it to make it more clear it was only downloading/exporting they were talking about. Nothing changed.
You don't understand, Fashtas. El Reg is never wrong. So when they originally misread Google's announcement, reality changed so that Google's announcement itself was wrong.
Google then had to change the announcement in order to make it consistent with what they'd actually done, in order to prevent their servers becoming out of sync with the new reality. Since Google's servers are so many and so well distributed, the shear forces would have ripped a hole in the fabric of reality big enough to swallow the planet.
Since The Register's re-mis-interpretation is in line with Google's actual changes, the space-time rupture has been prevented. For now.
It's Google, it's The Register, so it's a negative story. Besides, Drive is a failed product which only has a large "active user" base because it's forced on people when they sign up for a GMail account. It's like a ghost town there. Who even knew you could upload files?
There is no difference between the first announcement and the second announcement.
"Download Google Docs in Office 2003-07 format" means exporting files from Google Docs to your computer in the old formats. That's what they say will not be supported any more in the first statement, and the new statement says exactly the same thing.
The only difference is that now, they tell you how you can open the new formats on your computer if you are still with an old version of Office, and they make clear that importing old formats is still possible, contrary to the FUD.
""Download Google Docs in Office 2003-07 format" means exporting files from Google Docs to your computer in the old formats. That's what they say will not be supported any more in the first statement, and the new statement says exactly the same thing."
Except 07 used the new formats, not the old?
I think ratfox typed from memory instead of copy / pasting
At the time of this post the wording of the Google statement is:
"The following features are intended for release to these domains on October 1st:
Docs: The built-in exporting feature from Google Docs to Microsoft Office will now allow users to download Google documents as modern Office formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx), as opposed to the older formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) that were standard in Office 97-2003. For users who still use Office 97-2003, we recommend installing the free compatibility plugin from Microsoft, which will allow them to open modern Office file types."
Actually, copy / pasted right from this article…?
After a quick look, It seems that the 2003-07/97-2003 confusion was a mistake in the original post from Google:
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