Google is no longer supporting the older Office file formats within Google Docs and also requires the latest versions of browsers to work with Google Apps

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Reported in The Verge, Google has just announced that from October 1st 2012 they will no longer support downloading documents in the old Office file formats – .doc, .xls, .ppt.  This means customers will have to update to the new XML-based formats – .xslx, .docx, .pptx etc. – to use Google Docs. The announcement applies to all editions of Google Apps – for Education, Business and Government.

This follows shortly after announcing that Google Apps will no longer be supported on older versions of Internet Explorer – 8 and backwards, reported by TechCrunch. It’s understandable – Microsoft has been slow to embrace modern web standards and you really need to be on IE9 for modern web app designs, preferably IE10 (the first to fully support CSS3). The other browsers – Firefox, Chrome and Safari have all been quicker to recognise HTML5 and CSS3 standards.

On browsers, Google’s official statement:

As we announced last year, we support the latest version of Google Chrome (which automatically updates whenever it detects that a new version of the browser is available) as well as the current and prior major release of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version of one of these browsers is released, we begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

Internet Explorer 10 launches on 10/26/2012, and as a result, we will discontinue support for Internet Explorer 8 shortly afterwards, on 11/15/2012. After this date users accessing Google Apps services using Internet Explorer 8 will see a message recommending that they upgrade their browser.