14 DAY TRIAL // The battle between Google and Microsoft continues with a new episode, this time after the Mountain View-based search giant decided to add better support for Office to its Docs online productivity suite.
Two weeks ago, Microsoft launched a new attack at Google, calling its own Docs solution a service that provides “suboptimal experience” and emphasizing that it was full of compatibility issues that might affect formatting when working with popular document formats.
Google has tried to become more of a doer and less of a talker, and as my colleague Gabriela Vatu told you yesterday in her I/O 2014 live coverage, the search company integrated native Office editing in Docs to make sure that no such compatibility issues existed.
To be more specific, Google now allows users to save new documents they create in Docs using Microsoft's own Office format, which obviously adds better compatibility between the two solutions. Google Docs was already capable of opening Office documents, but thanks to the new updates, everything should work more smoothly for everyone, letting them open Office files and then convert them to the Docs format.
All of these are possible thanks to the QuickOffice acquisition that Google completed two years ago, which already offered support for Microsoft Office documents in offline mode. However, Google has integrated them in the online service, thus trying to better compete with its long-time rival based in Redmond. Microsoft is already offering such options, but this is living proof that competition is always good for users.
Microsoft hasn't yet issued a statement on this, but it's obvious that its recent comments that Google Docs is much inferior to Office 365 no longer make sense.
Redmond pointed to Google Docs' formatting issues as the main reason why users should go for Office whenever they want a powerful productivity suite in their browser.
“If someone on your team moves the file to Google Drive and opens it to make changes, you no longer experience that familiar Office look and the formatting is a mess, will likely be recreating the formatting and making sure no content was lost,” the company said today.
“No matter what kind of group project you’re collaborating on, you don’t want to waste time reformatting and finalizing the collective work of your team, or worrying whether one or more of your team members is unable to share in the rich Office experience on their devices.”
We’ve reached out to Microsoft for a word on this, so we will update the article when and if we receive an answer to let everyone know what Redmond has to say about this new batch of improvements for Docs.