Google Documents Not Too Shabby

I’ve been working with a client in Australia and the way we’ve been communicating is through a shared document on Google Docs. I’ve checked it out before but never really used it. Well now that we’ve been communicating ideas and project tasks extensively through the document I’ve found it a very useful app for collaborative efforts.

Hot Keys
If you’re a more experienced MS Word user, you probably use a lot of hot-key combinations like Ctrl+B for bold, Ctrl+Z for undo, etc. Well Google Docs seems to have built in all of the most used hot-keys into their application so you don’t have to go clicking around. Even Ctrl+S for save works. I didn’t know they had this functionality, I just started hitting hot-key combinations because that’s what I instinctively do on Word and I was pleasantly surprised they worked. It’s also a got a built in revision tracker and keeps track of multiple editors and the changes they made.

Ease of Use
There’s things like auto-save and I believe you can export the document to a variety of formats though I haven’t used that function. The user interface is very clean and easy to use. It’s very intuitive, I never used Google Docs and I became familiar with it in the first 5 minutes. Overall, I find it a fairly well built application and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do very well. It’s not overloaded with a million features you don’t need. I still wouldn’t put private, sensitive information on Google Docs but for general usage requiring collaboration and sharing, Google Docs is definitely pretty useful.

Definitely a Need for This
I wish this was around when I was taking my business planning class at Cornell. There were 3 of us emailing each other Word docs and Excel spreadsheets all semester. It was hell keeping track of what changes were made, whether the changes should be kept, whether to revert back, etc. I still have the folder and it’s got around 50 files in there many of them different versions of the same document. Google Docs would have eliminated all the email and version-tracking hassle.

Heck, combine this with Skype and groups won’t even need to meet - you can just teleconference and edit the document simultaneously. Wikis and document management systems also come to mind, however I haven’t used either of these tools extensively, so I can’t comment.

An Opportunity?
Some type of affordable product suite of this type targeted at students would be pretty useful, or you could get the school to pay for bulk licensing.. I will say no more ;-). I just know at Cornell there was nothing like this available for us. Each group member paid around $150 just to print/bind several copies of our business plan at Kinko’s (we were required to). So I would have been willing to pay a nominal fee (especially if split with group members) to use an application to manage our documents and communications for a semester. But then we’re talking about college students - if you can do something for free why pay for it. Obviously it would have to have more tools than Google Docs and provide enough of a productivity boost to justify the fee.. something to be figured out..

Anyway, I’m just taking a work break and posting my thoughts on Google Docs.

P.S. Happy Halloween!

Update: I was completely unaware of this when I was wrote this entry but Google announced today that they’ve purchased Jotspot, a startup company marketing paid wikis. They will probably add this to their “Google Office” suite which now includes a word processor and spreadsheets.