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Today Google announced that their Google Docs service will support Word 2007 .docx files and Excel 2007 .xlsx files.
That saves Office 2007 users from having to ‘Save As’ to another format before uploading to Google Docs.
Larger documents
Google Docs has a size limit on uploaded files (500kb for documents and 1MB for spreadsheets). The Office 2007 document formats are compressed so much larger documents can be uploaded in 500kb of a .docx file than the same file size of .doc or .rtf.
Save to
You cannot download a Google Docs document or spreadsheet in Office 2007 format. However you can download using the similar OpenOffice format (.odt or .ods) which is supported in Office 2007 Service Pack 2.
Conversion
Keep in mind that Google Docs converts your document when uploading. Some more complex documents might lose formatting or ‘meta-data’ while being uploaded to Google Docs.
This isn’t Google’s fault, and the same can and does apply to any document conversion process. For example OpenOffice documents (.odt and .ods) imported into Office 2007 SP2 can (and do) have the same problem.
In Microsoft speak, uploading and later downloading from Google Docs is not a ‘round trip’ process.
No PowerPoint
The notable omission from the Google Docs announcement is support for PowerPoint 2007 .pptx files.
Only .docx and .xlsx
You can’t upload macro-enabled Word/Excel 2007 documents in .docm and .xlsm formats if only because Google Docs doesn’t have any macro support. The workaround would be to save a non-macro copy of the same file then upload that.
Smarties might try simply renaming the .docm or .xlsm file to .docx / .xlsx then uploading. That might work with Google Docs ignoring the macro elements in the upload. However we’ve not tried this and, if you do try it, make sure you keep a copy of your original macro enabled file.
Chrome
If you’re a regular user of Google Docs or Gmail, then consider trying the excellent Google web browser, Chrome. Chrome is our preferred browser these days since it’s fast and flexible. Its fast Javascript support means good response on Javascript intensive sites like Google Docs.
Article posted: Monday, 01 June 2009
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