Good news for Google Drive users and anyone who has now converted to using Docs, Sheets, and Slides as your main office suite of choice, Google has added in some handy new features that further extend the usefulness of their office apps by allowing even more format compatibility for office documents files. Yesterday we were alerted to the new changes that came to all three of those applications which added in some efficiency and more control of things within the app, and today we get another fairly minor update with a few new features, thanks Google.
The new features include support for importing all three of the major ODF file formats, for files created within programs like Open Office for example. If you use Drive, you can import .odt files for documents, .ods files for spreadsheets, and .odp files for presentations. After you have these files imported into drive you can access and manage them like you would any other document, spreadsheet or presentation file, and collaborate on them with others by sharing them online and allowing access to specific people. Other open platform office suites are also supported, so it isn’t limited to a program like Open Office which we listed above.
The cool thing with this update to drive is that Google has made it easy for anyone looking to import these new file formats to discover how to do so with a handy little tutorial and detailed description on the process, which you can get to from this link, but we’d imagine if you already use Google Drive you may already have some idea of how to get the new open file formats imported. Google has also added some more improvements to make things a little more friendly. Drive now also supports more complex SmartArt from older Powerpoint presentations, and Google has also made it possible to import or export any of the files made in changes last week, with support for merged cells in Word and slide numbers in Powerpoint. If you’re a Google Drive user currently, how are you liking these new changes coming to the app? Is there something you’d like to see support for that isn’t currently there?