Steve Kinney

In an age where Microsoft Office may seem ubiquitous, there are other options. Who cares? Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint work just fine. OpenOffice is great, but is a bit clunky – particularly on the Mac. Office file formats are universally accepted and, as a result, easy to transfer between computers.

There is one area where Office falls short: collaboration. Google Docs is a web-based applicaton that allows users to prepare documents, spreadsheets, and presentations through their browser. Being web-based has inherent perks as well as some considerable disadvantages. Letting Google store your work frees you from the worrying about a hard drive crash. It also makes your work accessible from any computer with an internet connection. The drawback is that you need to be at a computer with an internet connection in order to access your work.

What Google Docs brings to the table that Microsoft Office doesn’t is the ability for multiple people to work on the same document. Users don’t have to be on the same network or in the same office. They can be anywhere in the world. In addition, multiple users can work on the same document simultaneously. In contrast, only one user can work on a document at a time in Microsoft Office. Other users are relegated to read-only mode.

Simulanteous editting is a bit clunky – simultaneous does not mean instantaneous. The document refreshes every few seconds with new changes by other users. You don’t see each letter other users type as they type it; you have to wait a few moments. This can be a bit frustrating if you’re working on the same section of the document. However, it is a much more elegant solution than emailing multiple versions of the same document back and forth.

Google Docs come in three flavors: word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. Each of these looks a lot like their Microsoft counterpart – albeit stripped down; anyone familiar with Word, Excel, or PowerPoint should feel relatively comfortable with Google Docs.

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