Google releases 'Docs & Spreadsheets'

Google has released their anticipated Docs & Spreadsheets apps.

I thought I'd have a look at them and write a little about them...

The 'Docs' application is based on Writely, which was bought by Google some time ago. It's fairly sophisticated, supporting Microsoft Word documents, OpenDocument files and StarOffice files.

Editing your documents is quite simple. The interface is sparse, but items are well laid out and it's surprising that all the common features you expect from Word or OpenOffice are there. Obviously a few items are in different places - The file menu contains the 'Count words' and 'Fine & Replace' features for example. But that actually makes quite a lot of sense when the only menus you have available are 'File, Edit, Insert and Revisions'.

The Revisions part is in fact, extremely useful. It allows you to jump back and see your file as it was a minute ago, two minutes ago, etc, depending on when you made changes. This history even remains after you close and re-open the document. There's still a normal 'Undo', too.

You can save straight to Word, OpenOffice, PDF or HTML (zipped) formats. It's easy to insert image and move text around, however you can't easily move images around. Instead you have to specify the alignment of the image, the same as you would in HTML.

Spreadsheets, is relatively similiar in it's ease of use, and support of documents. I tried a couple of Excel spreadsheets that I had laying around and it handled them with ease, including Formulae. In fact it seems much easier to write formulae in Spreadsheets than in any other package I've used as you can simply click on the commonly used functions and it helps you build your formula. One thing I did miss though, was that you can't drag a cell's contents to another cell - something that I do all the time when editing spreadsheets.

Both Docs and Spreadsheets offer the ability to invite other people to Collaborate with you on any documents you wish. You simply click on 'Collaborate', enter the email addresses of those that you wish to collaborate with you and Google does the rest. You can then discuss the document, or simply allow them to make changes. How Google deals with concurrent changes is something to watch out for. This feature will certainly make life very easy for people outside of big businesses to easily collaborate for free on documents and spreadsheets.

Obviously neither of these applications are going to give you all of the features you're used to in a fully-fledged office suite, but the important features and compatibility are here.

Generally I'm quite impressed with the applications. If you need access to documents wherever you are and need to edit them, or if you want to take advantage of the collaborative features then these are two very useful tools.

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yea, i use it, kinda like it, cuz the doc. is save on google's server