Today, Google announced the support for docx and xlsx support for Google Docs. This is a big relief for the users as they are clamoring for the support of Office 2007 formats.
Today, I’m happy to be able to answer their question: we’ve added .docx and .xlsx to the list of file formats
that we accept for uploading documents (which already included .doc,
.odt, xls, .ods, .ppt, .csv, .html, .txt, .rtf, and others).
Personally, this is a big relief for me. My wife keeps sending documents in Docx format to my gmail account and I couldn’t open it directly on my Google Docs account. Till now, I download the document and then open it on Zoho Writer, which has been supporting Office 2007 formats from Sept. 2008 onwards. (Disclaimer: Zoho is the sponsor of this blog.) Even though I like the cool interface of Zoho Writer, the support for these formats in Google Docs takes one step out of my document sharing process with my wife.
The online Office Suite applications are maturing fast and we are seeing adoption in large universities and, even, big enterprises. Support for Office 2007 formats by major SaaS vendors takes one last hurdle out of widespread adoption of web based Office Suites. As an unabashed Cloud Computing evangelist, I feel happy that the time has come to uninstall the desktop Office software completely.
Krishnan : Try using Zoho Mail as a Gmail alternative/backup. That way, you can avoid the download step 😉
I agree Zoho should provide a way to read Gmail attachments directly.
Since I use Zoho Mail for Cloud Ave, I dont want to mess it up with personal mails 🙂