[LINK] Google imposing file conversion

[Scott Howard]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 5:47 PM, Jan Whitaker <jwhit at janwhitaker.com> wrote:

> I was alerted to this in a newsgroup this morning. What give Google
> the right to convert documents into a different format?
>

You do!  But only if you select the option that says "Convert documents,
presentations, spreadsheets, and drawings to the corresponding Google Docs
format" when you upload (or have elected to have this always enabled, which
is under settings).  If you don't select this, it doesn't convert them.

 Although the announcement doesn't say it does this, further testing
> by the original poster shows that it is already happening. Files
> stored as .doc are being returned as .docx.


No.  Files stored at .doc will always be .doc - unless you elect to convert
them, in which case they will be converted to Google Docs format.

What's changing is what happens when you download a document which is in
Google Docs format - either because you converted it during upload,
explicitely converted it after upload, or because you created it new in
Google Docs. Previously these were exported as a 15 year old format (doc).
Now they will be exported as a 5 year old format (docx)



> He said he has also
> noticed that Google Docs no longer appears on this gmail account, has
> changed to Google Drive.
>

This change happened months ago. April/May to be exact.

  Scott