Mcneri’s Blog

Google is looking at functionality, albeit incompletely

When Google announced its Google Documents back in 2006, many people saw some big things coming. It is a web-based template for running everyday office applications at no charge. We were not surprised that it was free and totally accessible to anyone with a google email account. I personally was quite excited at the idea of having such a piece since Microsoft Office has been unreasonably priced, especially considering how many people using it worldwide, licensed or not and the tactics Microsoft has used in the past to ‘force users to use the software‘. An everyday application like that should be cheaper. The price is similar to one wanting to sell a mouse for 400 dollars!

Google Documents is a utility I think everyone should take advantage of more especially in health care research of because its unique features of multi-party document editing and the ease of distribution. It also has a complete suite of office applications which come in handy in seminars and presentations. It has evolved a long way so far, but they may not have it all right, as some bugs may still be bugging the application. With the online software suite, one can upload documents for collaboration and editing by many members of the same team irrespective of where each member is. Some cool features still lacking though include the capability to search documents or translate on the fly (even though they taught the world to search(copyright my slogan PLEASE!))

The video explains a bit more. The not so good news is that back in November 2007, I did do some collaboration on a scientific paper which we were writing using this facility. It seemed a bit limiting and the application hung anytime I and my collaborator tried to work simultaneously. I abandoned shop and went back to good old email and that has worked well until now.

Some time in January, I was in need of a Word to PDF conversion of one of my research papers so I went back to the software. Again it did disappoint me, as many of the special characters like epsilon and zeta did not appear correctly when I uploaded my microsoft word document.

Distorted special characters by Google Documents

This evening, Techcrunch’s Duncan Riley published an update that the toolbar is now looking more like Microsoft Office 2007. Read full article here. The official Google Docs Blog reported that the change was based on research and because people were more used to those positions for functions. I just hope their performance is anything to write home about, at least in terms of multiple log ons for a single document. The down side for Google is that Sun’s Star Office 8 which is a continuation of Openoffice.org’s OpenOffice has the PDF converter facility and I have been using it, easy, converting documents on the fly. It even converts Impress (its MS Office Powerpoint equivalent) to PDF as well on the fly.

I was going to compare Google Docs with another application that is also a productivity suite, but it is past my bedtime and I will save that for another day.

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This post is tagged beta, bug, Google docs, Google documents, Impress, MSFT, OpenOffice, Star Office 8, Techcrunch