Ballad in Plain E

I’ve been using Google Docs (formerly Writely) & Spreadsheets over the past week or so, and I love it! I’ve been using the Docs side to compose blog posts (mainly because I haven’t figured out how to add a spell-check plug-in to Wordpress yet) and do my writing class assignments, and I used Spreadsheets the other day to help a friend make a master list of slides for his art history class. And I haven’t even tried out the collaboration features yet! Here’s why I’m digging it:

• I can log in from anywhere via my Google account–as long as I have internet access, there’s no need to cart around that clunky flash drive! ;)
• It doesn’t insert as much annoying hidden formatting as say, Word, does
• The familiar interface made it a breeze to pick up
• There are plentiful “save as” format options (HTML, RTF, Word, OpenOffice, PDF - yes, PDF!)
• Like Gmail, it autosaves, and also (this is so slick!) saves revision history. It’s like point-in-time, only for word processing!!

I’ll be honest. I only started using it because when I reinstalled my completely legitimate copy of Office XP on my computer, it didn’t want to accept the registration key, so every time I use Word, it prompts me to register and tells me only have a few uses left. Since I can’t be bothered to call Microsoft and complain, this is an awfully nice substitute. Obviously, Google Docs is nowhere near as sophisticated as Word, but outside of work, my word processing needs are few–I don’t use 90% of Word’s “features”, so I’m not missing much.

I was a WordPerfect fan anyway. I may never get my all-time favourite keyboard shortcut (the glorious “Shift-F6 to centre”) back, but it’s nice to know that I’m not completely stuck with Word.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 1:00 am and is filed under Web Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.