Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Lately, I’ve found myself distributed across many locations – home, office, in-laws, coffee houses, and sometimes on different continents.  Granted I normally keep my laptop with me, there are a a few times when I’ve had only my BlackBerry but have had Internet access through somebody else’s PC.



Enter Google Docs and Spreadsheets.  Google purchased Writely a while ago and ended up integrating Writely’s web-based replacement for Microsoft Word and the thing just works (with fairly minor annoyances).  I’ve been using Google Docs for to-do lists, functional spec writing, and ideastorming.  Features like revision comparing, web collaboration, and document publishing along with exporting to PDF, Microsoft Word, or OpenOffice documents makes this offering versatile and handy to say the least. 



Many shrug off Google D&S as being too lightweight for production use and having such a tiny set of features that OpenOffice is a better (and free) option.  I think OpenOffice is great and we run it on all our PCs as well but, again, the idea of being able to pull up your documents from any PC from anywhere in the world is neat.  (I was able to pull up docs from airport terminals in Dubai and Singapore.)

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Published:
03.05.07 / 11am
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