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Infoworld: Google's surprise: ODF support launches ahead of schedule
As promised in London's ODF Plugfest early this year, Google announced today that it’s now officially supporting ODF files in Google Drive allowing users to import all three major ODF file formats. That includes .odt files for documents, .ods for spreadsheets, and .odp for presentations, the file types used by applications like Open Office and others supporting the open platform.
Google, like Microsoft, has not made it easy to use ODF as part of a workflow, with change tracking information, annotations, and other metadata left off the import and export process. For both companies, ODF has been seen as a migration format rather than as a working format, however Google faces significant pressure securing government business in many countries around the world, and especially the U.K. now that ODF is a requirement in so many procurement policies.
Official interest in ODF around the world is growing, and since Google wants to sell Drive and Chromebooks into government-controlled markets, ODF is becoming a gating factor.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:35AM
I never put anything of real value on Google Drive.
But I do use it. Mostly for documents I want to share with others, all of a non-confidential nature.
I've never found any indication of leakage from my test documents that placed on Drive. I've got strings in some documents that never show up in any search engine, and links I've embedded in documents (back to my own server) never get any hits. Those documents are not linked anywhere else, (not even to others on the same server) and I use them as my canary, and have scheduled log scans looking for any such hits.
So far I haven't got any complaints about Google Drive, but the same tests have shown hits from Microsoft OneDrive.
Most of my use is to store pdfs, because I don't like how it presents documents from word processors and offers to edit them every time you access them. The changes made on Drive aren't always compatible with the Word or OO/LO computer based packages, so you have to view placing documents there as a one way street. Any fancy formatting will be lost on upload.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.