Apostrophe S

I’ve known about Google Docs since way back when Writely was first acquired. Up until now I’ve never really thought it was that useful. But over the past few days I’ve been finding myself working on some word processing documents both at work and at home, so I decided to give Docs a try. So far, I’m impressed. It’s feature-rich, and pretty stable. Hell, it seems to work faster than Word ever has on my Powerbook. Browser-based applications have the unfortunate characteristic of having their most powerful feature also being their greatest weakness; Because Google Docs is online and accessed through a Web browser, I can get to my stuff from anywhere without have to copy any files from one place to another. But the downside is, I have to be connected to the Web in order to use it.Not that that’s a huge problem. Let’s face it, a modern computer not connected to the Internet is crippled. And what with the growing ubiquity of Wi-Fi, there are very few places I would want to take my Powerbook that wouldn’t have Web access.

So, for the moment, Google Docs is finding it’s way into my everyday work and personal writing. As a matter of fact, I’m writing this entry from Google Docs.

Some features I love:

• The ability to E-mail the currently open document both as the body of the email or as an attachment in a variety of formats.
• Collaborating on documents. (Although I haven’t actually gotten to use this yet.)
• Being able to check all past revisions of the document.
• The ability to export in practically any format.

Some features I’d love to see:

• Easier insertion of special characters. (You know all those Adobe character shortcuts? Those are great…)
• Ability to upload PDF documents just like I upload Word and OpenOffice documents.
• “Preview” mode that shows page margins and accurate line breaks.
• Ability to Save As an external document format, work on that document in an external application (let’s say while offline in the woods or something), and then upload the document so it “re-joins” the original document as the next revision.
• Better find and replace.