Users of the search giant's consumer productivity suite, Google Docs, will still be able to export documents in the older Microsoft formats.

The Google Apps change, which affects all versions of Microsoft's productivity suite from Office 97 to Office 2003, takes effect Oct. 1.

Once the change is implemented, Google Apps users who do not have a version of Office that supports the newer document formats for Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx) and PowerPoint (.pptx) will need to convert documents exported from Google Apps into older formats. Such conversions can be performed with a free utility program distributed by Microsoft.

For organizations with a diverse user base, Google's action makes using its commercial productivity suite a potentially annoying exercise.

Document collaborators using the older formats never needed to worry about whether their fellow collaborators had a newer version of Office because the suite is backward compatible. Even the latest versions of the suite can read the older formats. However, older versions of the suite can't read the newer formats.