Google Docs, your online “Office” tools
Google Docs Logo
When you think of spreadsheets, presentations and documents the first thing that comes to most people’s mind is Microsoft Office especially in the corporate environment. However when Google steps into the fray they aim to change this mindset and they are slowly doing just that with Google Docs.
What is Google Docs
Google Docs is aiming big, it is aiming to be an Office replacement which creeps deeply into the corporate arena replacing Office where ever it can. Google Docs allows you to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and more importantly allows you to save them in the Office file extension giving you compatibility with the people who refuse to move away from Office. Extensions like .doc, .xls and .ppt are supported plus many more.
All the files you save on Google Docs are saved online, meaning you can access them from around the world at any time (unless Google has downtime which seems to happen a little more often these days). It also means that your files are pretty safe in terms of backups and security although a few Office security features have been incorporated into Google Docs as well.
Moving to Google Docs is also relatively easy. You can upload all your PowerPoint, Word and Excel documents into Google Docs and they will be immediately available for you to use.
Online (real-time) collaboration and sharing
One of the best features of Google Docs must be the sharing and collaboration feature. By simply entering in an email address you can add a “viewer” or a “collaborator” of a document and what is even cooler is that you can add as any as you want per document. On top of that this is all done real time. So if you have 2 people editing a document at the same time all the changes will be synced and displayed in a chat box while they are being done. This in turn informs both of the collaborators that changes have been made and what/where they are.
You also have the option to make the document publicly viewable which means that anyone can view your document by simply clicking a link. Then with Google Apps slowly getting into the corporate environment it will be easy enough to share you document to your entire company.
Why we think Google Docs is great
With the internet make global business so much easier the need to collaborate becomes so much more important. With Google Docs real-time collaboration is made easy and simple allowing people from around the world to come together. Imagine no need for revisions to be sent 100 times via email which you have to wait for whilst the email is being downloaded onto your email client.
The best point however is that Google Docs is absolutely free which makes it worthwhile especially whilst we are still trying to recover from the recession. Now all we need is the Google OS to be released so we can totally move onto cloud computing which is definitely the way forward.
Here a few screenshots of a presentation, a spreadsheet and a document:
This was posted by Seagyn Davis who has posted 212 items.
→ Shared folders in Google Docs – Tx Daily said on: October 26, 2009 at 2:05 pm
[...] was just the other day that we talked about Google Docs and the possibilities you have with using it but there has been something very important missing; [...]