Why not use the online power of Google Docs?

With the world moving towards an even greater internet network, we are seeing applications built that exist solely online.  They’re built really well and some are designed thoroughly to have an easy interface.  So much so that it is now viable to do all your work on the internet without any local software actually downloaded and installed on your PC/Mac.  Obviously this is useless without an internet connection but it opens up the possibilities for the future.

Think about it, no packaging, no fiddly discs to lose or instruction manuals to store.  All online.  The most commonly used application has to be Microsoft Office or any other Office package like OpenOffice.  Now if you need to transfer one file from your computer to another you’ll either email it or use a memory stick. But if you use the power of Google Docs you can have the usefulness of Office online with all your files saved there as well, meaning you can access them anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

Technically still in beta, Google Docs has been running since October 2006 and I have been using it for just under a year or so.  Although it doesn’t pack all the punches of a fully blown office suite it consists of the basic – Text Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations.  These essentials are all that’s required for the average user, and for me that’s enough.

Text Documents work just like any other text editor although in a more stripped down fashion.  You only have a choice of about a dozen commonly used fonts including Comic Sans, Verdana, Tahoma and Sans Serif.  You do have the ability to enter footnotes along with subscripts and basic tables.  I found this the Documents the most developed part of Google Docs and, in my opinion, will serve all but the most demanding jobs.

Spreadsheets is what you’ll be used to using as Excel.  It works in very much the same way but if you’re a die hard Excel fanatic you’ll soon realise the lack of features.  Saying that you can do every single formula you require with Google Doc’s extensive catalogue of options letting you calculate the sum,average,nominal,random and everything.  The graph feature is primitive at best and gives you some options of a pie, line and bar graph with little customisable options.  What I do like about it though, is it’s clean appeal but the options are a bit cumbersome to access.  The buttons letting you annotate them are just too insignificant for something so important…

Presentations is the same as Powerpoint. There are 15 preset theme backgrounds for you to use and you can upload your own background photo as well.  Once again you are limited with the five fonts – Verdana present but Comic Sans missing out.  If you are familiar with the office shapes like speech bubbles and stars you’ll recognise them here as well which are implemented quite nicely.  The options also allow you to add photos and videos to the mix to make your presentation perfect.

If you work in a small business or need to share your uber document around, there is a nice feature of Google Docs which you will like.  You can share the document with anyone who has an email address and invite them either just as a viewer or someone who can actively edit the document with you.  It’s like sharing your desktop but so much easier and safer, now you can work on stuff together in the comfort of your own home.  Even if you don’t like the person, there’s no excuse now as you don’t need to see them!  If you don’t want to share it you can export any of the online files to the standard format on your pc.  It doesn’t take a second to download and it’ll be just like you did it on your offline suite for the most part.

You are limited for each file type with text documents having to be under 500kb with a 2MB image space.  Spreadsheets limit you to 10,000 rows,256 columns, 100,000 cells and under 40 sheets and Presentations must be under 10MB.  Overall you can have a total of 5,000 documents and presentations, 5,000 images, 1,000 Spreadsheets and 100 PDFs.  There is definitely a limited use to the product, but I doubt many people will still need to keep over 1,000 Spreadsheets at one time.  If you’re pushing the boundaries of these limits, this product is not for you yet.

So can you do all your work online now? Well… not yet.  Although it’s been in beta stage for a couple of years there are still slight hitches to overcome but when it’s finally officially finished, and there is not much to fix really, it will be an achievement.  Oh and the autosave feature is a god send, how many times have you been working on a long document only for the power to go? I know most Office suites already do this, although the time period is usually lengthy, but the way Google Docs informs you just helps reassure your mind.  It’s useful for little documents of text but anything that needs formatting with tables or extravagent fonts would be best left to the proper Office suites for now.  But nontheless check out Google Docs as it may mean you no longer have to carry around a memory stick that you keep losing…