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Google Docs let me down when it mattered most.

I really wanted to go all in on Google Apps and have been using them exclusively for the last year, but at the start of december I started negotiating a large contract and I had a solicitor drawing up some documents for me.

Both the solicitor and the large company I was negotiating with were sending me .docx files and Google docs was failing to number the paragraph correctly.

This let to quite a bit of embarrassment and was forced to go out and buy Office for mac. If I was using a Cromebook I would have to buy a whole other laptop.

7 comments

I'm conflicted here. Handling MS Office formats correctly is so essential to so many people that Google Docs really needs to do better here.

On the other hand it's such a shitty format that getting it right is a gargantuan task. LibreOffice doesn't get much credit here either and I'm not aware of any other 3rd party clients that do much better (correct me if I'm wrong).

I wonder if MS was to rewrite their binary file format reader/writer in MS Office (to for example be secure from the beginning) how long would it take for them to get it correct.

Has anyone tried QuickOffice? Google bought the company/app to bulk up its office doc editing abilities. It's been on android for years and from what I can see, it's now built in to ChromeOS. Perhaps this covers the more complex documents.

This. The Chrome store is ridden with lame and/or spammy apps that haven't met the bar I was expecting, and therefore you pretty much _have_ to use Google Apps for everything. For most individual use cases it seems ok, but enterprise-level adoption requires good substitutes for apps like Powerpoint, Word, and Excel. (Hell even as a contractor I wouldn't trust my work in Google Apps, as I've been burned before as well.)

If you just wanted to read the .docx files, an Office 365 subscription with Microsoft's online .docx reader would probably have sufficed.

QuickOffice reads .doc and .docx fine but borks on formatting and forget heavy editing. There are enough conversion and UX hassles that i'd say ChromeOS/Google Docs has a long haul to crack MS stack heavy enterprise. Funny thing is iOS and Android have better "apps" that handle MS formats.

Sounds like an amateur solicitor using .docs instead of a portable document format like PDF.

Did you try LibreOffice? It's somewhere between Google docs and MS Office.