When we discussed What Is Gmail, we mentioned one of the side benefits of using the Google email system was you got access to Google Docs. The question is “What is Google Docs?”, and more importantly, why you should care.
Pretty much everyone is familiar with Microsoft Office, and they are also familiar with the cost. Office has become the standard for productivity software like a word processor and spreadsheets, but no one thrills to the price this staple of workers and students everywhere costs them. There has been a free alternative for a while now called Open Office, but for some reason it never seemed to gain wide-spread acceptance. Since Google Docs is integrated into your Google account, it seems to be getting a bit more attention.
Currently you can create a document (replacing Word), spreadsheets (replacing Excel) and presentations (replacing Power Point). None of the three are quite as full-featured as their Microsoft counterparts, but they are working to catch up as quickly as possible, and also giving you some features you don’t have with the Office-standard.
One of those biggest advantages is the ability to invite other people with Google accounts to work on a document with it, or simply view it. This quickly gives you the added extra of a collaboration tool to work on projects with a co-worker, or someone else from your study group, a service you can usually expect to pay a fee for.
Until recently, the biggest drawback to Docs was you could only work while online, but in early April 2008, that all changed. A copy of your work is saved to your hard drive locally, making them accessible while you are offline. With the word processor, you do have limited editing abilities, but with the spreadsheets and presentations, for now, you can only view them with no editing abilities. Even without the ability to work on them, this is still helpful if you want to go somewhere without Internet access and make your presentation.
Is Docs a perfect replacement? Not yet (as of April 2008), but Google is very actively working on making it better on a near weekly basis, and it is free, so perhaps you should at least give it a try and see how it suits you.
