Thing #19: Google Documents

Thing #19: Apps, They're not just for desktops any more. Alas, another neat thing I can't use at home. My browser won't support it.

I love the idea of Google Documents, especially for those days when I forget my flash drive. In fact, I composed this post in Google Docs. And it's a great thing to show library patrons who need to work on their documents both at home and the library. The utility of this web-based document creation, editing, and storage is blazingly obvious. Of all the things we've seen in Nebraska Learns 2.0, I believe that this is the one that has the greatest potential to be useful to the widest spectrum of people. Flickr isn't for everyone. Neither is Twitter. Some people might not have a use for RSS (although that's harder for me to imagine), but everyone who uses a computer creates, uses, and shares documents of some type. And beyond its utility, the interface is intuitive and friendly. This app is pure gold, and I'm mighty grateful to you Nebraska Learns 2.0 folks for introducing me to it.

I have to disagree with the idea that web-based productivity software will be the death of Microsoft Office and other software products. First of all, at least at present, the web apps lack a lot of the functionality of the full software versions. I found the Google Documents slideshow function to be primitive, and it failed to import slides from an existing .ppt slideshow. I didn't do much with the Google Documents spreadsheet function, because I'm not a big Excel user, but it looked fairly basic to my untrained eye. But even with documents, which seems to be the nicest function, it's lacking a lot of the capabilities of Microsoft Word. For example, I imported one of my Word files (a template for printing DVD case inserts), and the formatting was blown all to heck. So you might not be able to put the final touches on a document that needs to look a certain way for printing.

Also, there's a security issue. Are Google Documents really private? Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure Google's robots aren't scanning the files? Are you absolutely sure they never, ever will? There will always be a handful of paranoid people (like me) who want to keep our most important files on our hard drives, which gives us at least the illusion of having control over them.

Lastly, there is the question of whether Google will really store your documents indefinitely. While Google as a whole seems to big to fail, they are not immune to the need to reorganize and kill off projects. While it's vanishingly unlikely that Google would ax Documents without giving people a chance to rescue or transfer their files, the possibility exists in theory.

Don't get me wrong. I love Google Docs, and I can tell I will be using it regularly and referring many others to it. For documents I need to share, or that I want to access from multiple computers, or which I intend to eventually put out on the open web anyway, it is fantastic and full of win. I think this is my favorite new tool I've picked up from these exercises.