Google Docs caves to MS Office 2007 file formats

Ironic

As MS Office 2007 with SP2 now supports ODF documents.

i.e. no need to support MS standard.

Useful to avoid the Microsoft Office tax

This is useful for handling the occasional Office 2007 document, as my copy of Office V.x otherwise works perfectly fine thankyouverymuch and I'd happily do without paying another wodge of cash to Microsoft.

(and there's always OpenOffice if I get really desperate!)

Simple procedure

We have a simple procedure for anyone sending us anything in the bastard formats - first offence, a polite request to re-submit the offending item in the standard ODF format. Second and all other offences the item is returned marked defective - unreadable. It works!

@Ivan

Very cute; but in many cases pointless as users (as where I work) have NO CHOICE in the office products they MUST use and in the standard formats which are supported internally. You may call them names, but the MS file formats and usage still outnumber the ODF and other open office formats world over and that's not going to change for a long time.

Myself; I only use open office at home and quite frequently get stuff from people using MS products and I can't read whatever it is. If they can't (or won't) resend in a format I can read, they're just out of luck.

Where I used to work...

At some point the Helpdesk I worked at became unable to purchase versions of Office older than 2007, since MS more or less controlled our software vendor. High on our build checklist was changing the defaults back to the old Office formats, which we learned to do after a storm of "Why can't (I | My Research Assistant | This guy in Sweden | .*) open this document?" tickets rolled in.

Never saw a compelling reason for the new formats...