Ah, Google Docs. Poster child of the Cloud Computing revolution and theoretical solution to all the worlds’ ills, there’s one thing I still don’t understand about you.
Why the heck everyone isn’t using you, all the time. For everything.
I mean, everything about you is darned-near perfect. You’re 100% free to use, handle collaboration brilliantly and provide full-blown writing and number-crunching powerz – or, as they’re more commonly known, Word Processing and Spreadsheetery – right in the web browser. From anywhere. I can sit at any computer in the world and start working, knowing full well that my work is “out there”, not tied to some stranger’s disk space or held in an easily lost pendrive. Hit F11 and I’m in full-screen heaven. Go to View->Full screen mode and I’m in better than heaven. Google Docs auto-saves regularly, and offers more ways to export my precious words that a cat knows how to get out of a locked room. Let me count the ways…..
- Download as a .doc Word file
- Or rtf
- Or Open Office
- Or plain text
- Or (clean) HTML
- What about straight to PDF format (my own preference), for free, and with zero hassle
- Print onto good old fashioned dead tree pulp using a Real Printer ™
- Output to the ‘net with a unique URL. Auto-update if you change the document, or not. The choice is yours
- Or, cleverest and ‘net savviest of all, publish the documents to your blog directly as a post
That’s what I’ve done right here, right now. This entire post was written in Google Docs, meaning I could check, save, revise as I wanted, then publish it as and when it’s done. Of course, this is something I could easily to within WordPress itself by just saving the post as a draft, but working in Google Docs gives me a larger workspace that’s more document-centric (making it ideal for larger posts), as well as providing the option to larger export the blogpost as a PDF document (or .doc, .rtf, .txt, yadda yadda), with zero effort. All in the collaboration features – collaborative blogposts are the future, man! – and it’s a compelling reason to consider Google Docs seriously for your blogging needs.
Of course, it’s not perfect. Google Docs doesn’t tag or categorize your work for you (as far as I can tell), so you’ll still need to fix that manually. But hey, if enough folks demand those features, They Will Build Them.
So tell me. What could you use Google Docs for, and why aren’t you?
Are you on your way home soon? I’m hungryyyy :p
I use google docs for my freelancing business information as HD crashes keep taking the little bits out like passwords etc. But google docs doesn’t quite have enough space per page that I generally use or need in some cases. Having to make multiple spreadsheet tabs for long spreadsheets isn’t quite as simple as I can make it in excel.
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