“Google’s hackles are raised over Microsoft’s claim that Google Docs doesn’t work well with Office files, and in fact, has a tendency to butcher Office’s page design elements. Alex Payne, Director, Online Product Management, Microsoft, said Office and Google Docs don’t play well together because Google Docs converts Office files into a different file format for viewing and editing, which strips out fonts, styles, charts, and other page elements. On Wednesday, Google said it has made a lot of progress in maintaining document fidelity when importing Microsoft Office documents into Google Docs. But Google apparently also sees some irony in Microsoft’s reasoning.”
I seriously lol,
“It’s not clear if any office chairs were destroyed at Microsoft as”
If MS used odf it would have had a point but this just shows that .doc and especially .docx should disappear as soon as possible.
Absolutely. I must admit that I initially thought the whole docx open xml was a great thing. Then I had to actually deal with it. Its not fun.
Its like the recent hack of running windows 3.1 on android. Old dumb technology in a shiny new shell.
“Microsoft says it has worked extensively on preserving document fidelity, and Payne said Office files viewed on a rich client are “almost identical” to those viewed through a browser using Microsoft’s Office Web Apps, the free versions of which will launch in June.”
Almost identical.. Keyword: Almost. They can’t even handle their own format the same way in the different versions of their own office products. And that they even need to state that they have “worked extensively on preserving document fidelity” with their own format is just sad.
Add to that, that they still haven’t been able to implement (or so they claim) the ISO standard version of OOXML in any of their office products and won’t do so until atleast the next version (not 2010), just makes this all the more ridiculous in my opinion.
“Microsoft’s claim that Google Docs doesn’t work well with Office files, and in fact, has a tendency to butcher Office’s page design elements.”
I don’t have too much experience with using MS Office & Google Docs together, however, I find OpenOffice works very well with GoogleDocs and Zoho.
I use the extension OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs (gdocs_2.2.0.oxt 2.2.0): This extension helps me upload to Google Docs or Zoho in just 2 clicks!
After reading the summary, the first thing that came to mind was “and yet, the easiest way to get an image out of a Word file is to use Google docs.”