The reason to support .xls is that lots of other software besides Microsoft office use it and thus lots of people benefit from compatibility.

I think this is a big mistake for Google.

So even though the format isn't changing, the subset of the format that Google works with is.

Try it if you haven't already by creating a Windows Live account and visiting http://skydrive.live.com and clicking the Create button at the top. You can do Word, OneNote, Excel and PowerPoint.

There are several other Free Software tools that will provide spreadsheet compatibility, Gnumeric being among my favorite. Also the KDE office suite, KOffice.

Can you expand on that? (I work in this space.)

Also, Google's formating possiblities are very limited compared to Excels. I run into this limitation frequently.

There are numerous other restraints I come up against with Google Sheets occasionally, but these 2 are the ones I miss almost every time I use it.

I have not spent a lot of time with Excel Live, so I am not sure how well it competes.

Considering Office costs me less than 10GBP a month over 3 years, and works entirely offline, Google docs doesn't cut it.

Oh well - rtf it is then.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313105(v=office.12...

.txt can be imported into Word to make .doc.

.html can be imported into either Excel or Word.

.ppt? No comment.

.csv, .txt and .html are much easier to work with across different operating systems.

.txt lacks any kind of formatting.

I don't know the current state of Word .html-Export. But in the past (late 90s/early 00s) it was known for being amazingly bad and using IE-extensions.

These were, if you check out output out, simply commented out metadata and custom prefixed CSS rules that allowed it to be imported back into Word if required without losing any information that was lost when exporting to HTML. You could remove all these with a text editor (or a regex) and it'd knock perfectly good HTML + CSS out.

Yeah, Google, Marissa left. Get over it. Stop with the petulant feature gutting. Who are you trying to impress?

A lot of users are going to get irritated at having to change their workflow to have a copy of Office to re-save documents before uploading them. If you need to have a copy of Office around to save them in the new format, then some of the savings by using Google Apps is diminished.

How many people are both "modern" enough to be using Google Docs, but sufficiently out of date that they need to export the old formats? I am guessing sufficiently few that Google doesn't really care about them. If their copy of Office is that old, how old is their browser? Can their browser even supported by Google Docs?

I didn't get the impression that Google Docs was only used by those. We probably won't see an outcry, though, because the people getting bitten by the change (and there are lots of smaller businesses who don't really see a need to upgrade to current Office versions) aren't that vocal on the net.

That's the thought that goes through my mind when I hear the "Yay, cloud!" line from the following MS ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h8f5AOCNcs