Microsoft has released ‘guides’ for anyone wanting to move from Google Docs to Office 365. They aren’t guides, they’re sales brochures.
There’s not a lot of information to help anyone wanting to move their document, email, calendar and contacts between Google and Microsoft’s cloud services.
All this thinly disguised marketing was written by sales people, not anyone who has to deal at the sharp end of switching to Office 365. Potential Microsoft customers deserve better than this drivel. It serves only to let sales people assure prospects that there are ‘online guides’.
For example, there are three Outlook related guides:
There’s plenty about the differences between Gmail/G Suite and Outlook. However, there’s nothing on how to migrate your data from one system to another – despite what you might expect from titles like “Switch to Outlook Mail from Gmail”.
Document conversion
The ‘Switch to ..’ guides for Word, Excel and Powerpoint talk a lot about the differences in the software.
Not a word about converting the Google document formats – .gdoc .gsheet .gslides etc.
In fact, the ‘Differences’ tabs don’t even mention the document format differences, let alone how to convert.
The fine print
And it’s worth keeping the fine print in mind.
- “Differences are based on G-Suite Basic Edition and Microsoft’s Office 365 E3 plan as of May 2017.
- Features and information in this guide apply to (Office) as available through Office 365.”
In other words, Microsoft is using their very latest release of Office software.
And they’re comparing Office 365’s high-end Enterprise plan with Google’s ‘Basic’ and cheapest offering.
