Why won't Google Desktop support OpenOffice.org?
When I first started using Google Desktop I was still using Microsoft Word. My favorite feature of GD was its ability to search inside my DOCs. However, somewhere down the road I switched to OpenOffice.org and was disappointed to find that Google Desktop does not have native support for ODTs. I installed Larry's OpenOffice and StarOffice Indexer, but its behavior is less than desirable. Larry's plugin only works on the original system index and does not allow Google Desktop to index newly created ODT files, or at least thats how it behave for me.
A few weeks ago I went to suggest ODT support on GD's suggestion page and gladly found this as a predefined feature to vote for. When I saw that Google released a new version of GD today, I thought for sure I would be able to use GD to its fullest extent once again. But I was disappointed. Native ODT support has still not been implemented.
As a matter a fact, I am pretty surprised by this delay. Google is usually quick to support open source projects. For example Firefox was always natively supported by GD and Google Docs currently supports importing and exporting ODTs. I guess I will just have to wait for the next version :(.
Labels: Google, Google Desktop, Open Source, OpenOffice.org
