The Value of Sharing
I plan on writing a few posts over the next couple of weeks around Google docs, Google’s online document system, but to get started wanted to talk briefly about what the application is attempting to do.
If you think about the average document what normally springs to mind is something like a letter or a proposal and typically you would use a word processor to write it up. Something like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer are the normal tools you think of too. If you think a little harder though about the actual process you use for assembling a document you may be in a position where you need to move the document around your organisation/friends/family to finalise it… everybody needs to put their 2c in. The problem this presents is that you need to manage this process, you need to send it to each person and then get their responses back into the document. If your organisation is anything like ours then everyone does it in their own way too, some people just change the document, other’s might ‘mark up’ the changes for approval. Some people might add comments inside the document and finally others might just respond in an email with the changes they want made, ahhhhhhhh!
Google docs is designed to make this process of collaboration easier. When you are in a situation where more than one person is building the document then you can open up or share your document with other people and all work on it at the same time. Thankfully Google takes care of knowing who changed what and allowing you to track back through the changes.
It does by providing a web based interface to these tools, so using only a web browser you can open up a document, make changes, save and close.
Right now Google offer three different document types:
- Documents
- Spreadsheets
- Presentations
So your basics are covered.
Now some people talk about this being a replacement for Microsoft Office, I just don’t think that’s the case. The functionality in these applications is just not rich enough yet to compete with the offline tools. You get the ability to do a lot of what you can do in things like Word, but not enough to through away Word altogether. I think it’s a matter of the right tool for the right job.
If you don’t already have a Google account, you can get one right now and it’s free, and then you can start working online and sharing your documents.
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