A Review of Google Docs

02/06/2008

As our lives become more entangled with technology, inevitably we begin to need our documents from anywhere, without having to rely on carrying around a USB drive to house our data. With Google Docs, Google hopes to make your data mobile and easy to access from anywhere that you have internet. Will Google Docs hold up against programs like Microsoft Word? I put it to the test.

Basic Functionality

Instead of doing my work in Writer, I decided to move everything over to Google Docs for a while. For basic typing, Google Docs performed fairly decently. It performed all of the basic formatting things such as bolding, italics, underlining, and indentation. I did find there were occasional issues where this program did not want to let go of the formatting. Sometimes, it would take 2 or 3 trys to remove the bolding from a line of text.

Another basic feature that didn't always work correctly was the copy/cut and paste feature. Especially when doing copying, if you attempted to use the hot keys, they often would not work at all. Sometimes even showing an error message about it. However, for basic functionality, Google Docs will work in a pinch.

Advanced Editing

For the advanced editing features, Google Docs also seemed to have the program in good working order. Features such as font choices and font sizes were both very limited, but they did a good job of covering the basics of what most people use. Highlighting, font colors, subscript, and quotes all worked as expected as well.

However, the one thing that fell very short of my expectations was the lack of a spellchecker. If you are using Firefox, it will tell you that a word is misspelled, but because Google Docs takes advantage of the right click function for advanced features, you cannot change a word that is marked as misspelled from the right click menu.

You also get an insert tab for bringing items into your document that you usually have to go into a more advanced word processing program to put them in your document. This includes things such as images, tables, headers and footers, links, and comments, which are good for making revision notes.

Finally, once you are ready to publish it, you can either print directly from Google Docs to your local printer, or it has options bult in for different formats that you can save it directly to your computer with, including MS Word, Open Office, and PDF, or you can view the whole thing in HTML and use it on a website.

Final Thoughts

As a stand alone word processor, Google Docs does its job well, but I believe it leaves a lot to be desired. The main selling point for it is that it is available just about anywhere so that you can edit your documents. This has been a major boon for me. However, I have a hard time trusting my data to be hosted by a big company down in California so security on here is a bit of an issue for me. The lack of a spell check is a huge negative for me. However, it is great for taking notes on the fly and if you need to compose a quick document. I say give it a chance, it's great for some things, but it will really start to shine more after this program matures a little.

Rating: 2.5/5


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