Google Docs Now Offers Better Ways to Deal with Incompatible MS Office Files

While Google Workspace is a decent office suite, especially great for collaboration, it is not always compatible with another big trendsetter in the industry – Microsoft Office. The recent formats usually don’t cause any trouble, but given the variety of MS Office files, incompatibility happens. Now, Google has better ways to notify users about potential format compatibility issues.

It’s obviously impossible to help it with a single update (Google had years for this and still is far from the absolute success). Yet there are ways to make these issues less stressful for users, the first of them being keeping them aware. Every incompatibility issue has a name and a set of symptoms, and if you start editing a file with known issues, Google Docs (or, well, Sheets and Slides, too) will inform you about it.

The notification that pops up next to the file extension will tell you that (verbatim) some Word features can’t be displayed and will be dropped if you make changes. This means the file you’re trying to edit is not fully supported by Google Workspace (maybe it’s an obsolete format or something like this). If so, the service also tells you about potential issues (with formatting, encoding, embedded elements – whatever may cause trouble). If you are sharing this document with other users, they will also be warned of this.

Anyway, there are ideological differences between Google Workspace and Microsoft Office. The former is a lightweight online suite for making basic editing and formatting and sharing files with others. The latter is meant to do as much job as possible locally and provide the most powerful integration, embedding, and formatting features. Recently, of course, they converged a little (you can use Google Docs offline, while Microsoft enables you to share documents via OneDrive), but this doesn’t change much.

Have you received notifications while working with MS Office files in Google Workspace? Did this mean losing something significant, like formatting, fonts, or embedded objects? Tell us about your experience in the comments!