Over the last few weeks I have been making more and more use of Google Docs firstly out of curiosity to see how rich an app you can build in a browser but more recently for business and home use. I would be the first to admit that compared to Microsoft Office or even OpenOffice the level of functionality is limited but Google Docs has something that the others don’t: the ability to share and collaborate on a document and this has proved invaluable. Yes, I know you can email documents from Office and turn on tracking but Google Docs is so much easier.
As an example AppSwing are currently doing some work to produce a video showing AppSwing in action (more on this on Monday) which involves the video production company (Magic-Bullet) and our PR company (Noble-Ink). We needed to jointly work on a script and so I created a rough draft in Docs and shared it with the others. We were then all able to contribute to the final version seeing what others had done. This greatly sped up the process and has allowed us to get something completed really quickly.
Don’t get me wrong Google Docs is not going to replace Office any time soon. I can’t create pivot tables in spreadsheets and the fact that you can’t create your own templates in presentations seems a major oversight but I can work on my documents anywhere and so can others and it is this aspect that makes it so powerful.