Google Docs Beta

 

by Edward Mendelson

The last time we looked at Google Docs, it was called Google Docs & Spreadsheets. A year later it's still a beta—typical of Google—but that doesn't mean that the would-be Microsoft killer has let its online office-productivity app languish over the past 12 months. Since we last looked, it's gotten a shorter name and a longer list of capabilities—and it now creates presentations in addition to word-processing documents and spreadsheets. Google still doesn't offer a vast feature set like those of its online rivals, Zoho and ThinkFree, but it's far more elegant, efficient, and enjoyable. Unlike Zoho and ThinkFree, it loads quickly and doesn't include features that require you to wait while software gets downloaded to your system. In its usual minimalist style, Google provides an uncluttered, visually appealing interface whose only flaw is that it's sometimes less informative than it ought to be, even for experienced users.

Once you've signed on, using any Google account, Google Docs opens an efficient, appealing-looking document-management window. A toolbar at the top lets you create, upload, hide, or delete any files that you've created or uploaded to Google's server. Beneath the toolbar is a two-panel file manager with a tree-view pane on the left and a list of documents on the right. By default, the list of documents shows all the ones you've created or uploaded to Google's servers. You don't need to store your documents in folders, but if you want to keep files organized, you can create folders whose names will appear in the tree-view pane on the left.

After creating or uploading a document, you can share it with one or more colleagues. If you do, your colleague's names will appear in the tree-view pane under a "Shared with…" heading. Furthermore, you can click on names in the tree-view in order to display a list of documents that you're sharing with that colleague. Using the Publish menu, you can post a document to a blog hosted by any standard blog service, or to a blog address on your own server. Conveniently, the same menu lets you remove a document from your blog if you change your mind about it after posting.

Google's word processor imports files in Word (through 2003), RTF, OpenDocument Text, and the ancient StarOffice format. It exports in Word, RTF, OpenDocument, HTML, PDF, and text formats. When you actually edit a document, it's in HTML format, so you can insert hyperlinks, pictures, tables, shading, numbered and bulleted lists, and any math or foreign character supported by standard HTML. You also can click on a link in the editing window and edit your document's raw HTML code.

You can't insert footnotes or other fancy page formatting such as headers and footers, so you won't want to use this as your only tool for academic writing. On the other hand, you can import Word documents that already have footnotes and endnotes, and your notes will be converted into HTML hyperlinks that work like footnotes when Google publishes them to the Web. Even better, if you export the document in Word format, the exported files will contain working footnotes and endnotes—a very clever and useful feature. In this, Google far outclasses ThinkFree, which simply strips out your notes when importing a Word document. Google's suite also outclasses Zoho, which correctly converts notes into hyperlinks when importing but leaves them as hyperlinks when exporting the document back to Word format, instead of correctly converting them back to endnotes and footnotes.

A Find and Replace feature is listed as "experimental" on the menu, and you should save your file before using it, because the current version of Google Docs can only "Replace All," not Find then Replace each instance of the string you're searching. More troubling yet, Find and Replace doesn't support Undo. Still, it's experimental; when Google eventually gets the kinks worked out, Find and Replace will be a feature that no text-editing program should lack.

As in Zoho, when you use the menu option that inserts a page break, you don't actually insert a page break—only some hidden HTML code that displays a dotted line across the document and tells the software to insert a real page break when exporting to a word-processing format or PDF file. This is a slightly clumsy system, and the program gets confused if you edit the underlying HTML code and add your own text to the HTML tag that specifies the page break—with the result that the text appearing below the page break on the screen ends up above the break in an exported document. The moral of this story is that you probably shouldn't edit the underlying HTML code, even though Google lets you do so. When you print a document that includes a page break, Google Docs (like Zoho) is clever enough to replace the horizontal line with a real page break.

Google Docs Beta: Full Review - Reviews by PC Magazine