One of Google’s web products that I use most often is Google Docs. This Document processing tool allows me to work/write articles “in the cloud”. For those of you who are hesitant to use Google Docs since its didn’t support uploading of your Excel or Word 97 files, well you would be glad to know that Google Docs has started to do so now.
Google Docs has started supporting Word and Excel 97 files with file extensions .docx and .xlsx. These two files add to the long list of documents currently supported by Google Docs including .odt, .xls, .ods, .ppt, csv, and more.
The process is pretty simple and all you have to do is to upload the file from your computer and Google Docs will automatically convert them into the file formats used by Google Docs. In fact, Google Docs won’t even ask you for the file format of the documents you are uploading.
For those who want to upload multiple .docx and .xlsx files at one, you can find some help at the Google Documents List API.
But in the meantime, you may start uploading your Word and Excel 97 files to Google Docs now and start working on them anywhere there is a PC and Internet connection.
Just one letdown though. Once you upload your documents and Google Docs convert them, some native Word and Excel formatting may not be carried through. So, make sure that you don’t have important formatting settings on your documents before uploading them to Google Docs. Otherwise, you might not see the same formats the next time you save your file from Google Docs to Microsoft Word or Excel 97.