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Writes 'Software developer Jeff Cogswell writes: 'About a year ago, I decided to migrate my documents to Google Docs and start using it for all my professional writing. I quickly hit some problems; frankly, Google Docs wasn't as good an option as I'd initially hoped. Now I use LibreOffice on my desktop, and it works well, but I had to go through long odysseys with Google Docs and Zoho Docs to reach this point. Is Microsoft Word actually better than Google Docs and Zoho Docs? For my work, the answer is 'yes,' but this doesn't make me particularly happy.
In the following essay, I present (as well as some possible solutions) from my perspective as both a professional writer and a software developer.' In a way, the choice of word processor is more or less irrelevant by comparison with the level of trust involved in putting my files in the hands of someone I don't personally know. If anything should happen to files on my own hard drives, I at least only have myself to blame for not having secured or backed them up. But there is always the risk that Google might be compromised, either from the outside or by some rogue sysadmin, and I don't want to even think about trying to claim any redress against Google if they fuck up.
Further, since I live a long way away from urban amenities, I can't count on the availability of a constant internet connection, which could easily put me in a bind if I had my files stored in the so-called 'cloud'. So, FWIW, my choice is simple: LibreOffice, since I don't run Windows. There will always be someone who will bitch that the free software suite doesn't have this or that all-important niche feature, but it has pretty much covered everything I need since it was StarOffice - only, of course, infinitely better now. It sounds like your situation with internet connectivity is reason enough to make LibreOffice the obvious choice. My situation is a bit different, in that everything I own is connected, and I need to be able to get at things from multiple locations. Carrying around a drive is a pretty cumbersome option for what I'm doing day-to-day, so online storage works really well.
I'm the first to concede that desktop word processing is better than the web versions, but I've found that most of what I need to bang out can be done with the web ones well enough. Or at least, for seeing what I've already done. And most of the fringe features that people make hay over in Word are things I never see anyone using anyway. Because there's usually a better way. But as with most of these things we try to argue about, it makes sense to do what your situation dictates.
I can't bring myself to get all religious about it one way or the other. I am a teacher and everything I do involves collaboration. With Gmail Docs, I can have a document open with both the student (at their home) and myself looking at the same doc at the same time and I can even see where the student has their cursor. It is the dog's bolox.
I never dreamed that such a perfect solution would arrive so soon. Does that mean that I think that it is the best office suite?
No, of course not. Why do all these articles overlook the simple fact that what is the dog's bolox for one person is just a dog for someone else. My friend runs his business on an Excel spreadsheet that has an incredible macro that requests all the information that the person taking the first call needs to ask the customer, receives that data and provides a quote and work sheets for the guys that do the work and then invoices and accounts etc. Complete package in one, I think he is mad but he thinks he has God in software form. I know that Google Docs is really God in software form. I find it quite depressing how little firms use macros etc. Many years ago we had a Lotus 123 system that read in a text file of account transactions from a mainframe then scanned each one, pulling in custom pricing for each client via additional sheets, formatting and printing a bill for each one with breakdown before issuing a charging schedule.
Worked great for 2000 plus clients a month. With Excel and Word plus macros we built some very sophisticated and functional pricing tools and even a tool that optimized cash collection routes for a security firm. These days, people don't even know macros exist.
Are you kidding? Macros are one of the, if not the most-used features of Excel in business (small and large). Excel is effectively a lightweight database, and the macro functionality provides a quick and dirty way for Joe sixpack to get into the data without having to write queries. Everybody uses Excel. Even people who don't know what a database is use Excel. Excel is used everywhere to track everything from orders to invoices to HR information (in which case, the spreadsheet is locked behind a password).
In a way, the choice of word processor is more or less irrelevant by comparison with the level of trust involved in putting my files in the hands of someone I don't personally know. If anything should happen to files on my own hard drives, I at least only have myself to blame for not having secured or backed them up. But there is always the risk that Google might be compromised, either from the outside or by some rogue sysadmin, and I don't want to even think about trying to claim any redress against Google if they fuck up. Absolutely right.
But a cloud provider has a team of pros exactly to avoid that. And I'd bet that for every file lost or compromised by a 'cloud accident' there are 100 of files lost in a drive crash or 'oops I didn't want to delete THAT folder' accident. (Or lost USB Stick or 'reply all' or what else for the 'compromised' variety) So basically, you need to choose your solution based on your personal risk profile, like, is your company big enough to hire someone to take care of backups and storing them offsite?
Is that guy reliable? I deal with documents on professional basis. This, in my industry, means that none of my documents may ever hit the cloud. (Encryption is a possibility, but it creates more problems than it solves.) I tried OpenOffice of several versions, over the years, and all of them were buggy. The latest one, for example, corrupted the watermark in the document. This is unacceptable. I have MS Office now.
It may have bugs (not that any bit me recently) but the overall quality of the software is certainly acceptable. OpenOffice does not pass that test - it is unusable in an environment where the wordprocessor will have to correctly handle all kinds of inputs, written by me or written by others. MS Office costs about $100 per license.
This is a very acceptable cost of doing business. Perhaps this would be too steep if you are a grandmother with limited resources who only wants to create a single page note about a missing cat and print it for her nearest neighbors. As a business, you want to be as sure as it ever gets that the important proposal that you are writing will be correctly opened by the soliciting party. (In many cases editable Word documents are requested, not a PDF.) A good wordprocessor is not a good target for an F/OSS project. It's a lot of boring, thankless work.
Nobody has an itch that has to be scratched in such a masochistic way. That's why F/OSS wordprocessors are all not very good. Same goes for accounting systems, CAD systems, and many more. Often a F/OSS project just can't muster enough resources to complete the project. A for-profit company has no such problem; they just pay money, and developers show up for work. Honestly, Wordpad is good enough for so many users' individual needs that it's almost foolish for the vast majority of users to purchase extra word processing software in Microsoft environments.
Hell, even the netbook I'm using to type this with Windows 7 Starter Edition has Wordpad built in. Throw in free word processors that are more feature-rich than Wordpad or are meant for other platforms and the actual number of users that needs Microsoft Office is very, very small. It's dumb for school districts to buy Office for most of their computers.
It's dumb for home users to buy it. I would argue that it's even possibly dumb for many professionals to buy it. They simply do not need it unless there's some true need to protect proprietary content. ' It's dumb for school districts to buy Office for most of their computers.' I respectfully disagree. Learning to use a computer in the way that you'll very likely be using it later in college and at work is one of the few sane things about school.
In 'IT class' (7th grade, I think it was), we learned basic HTML, Excel (formulas, charts, little tiny intro to macro) and basic Word (headings, automatic generation of dynamic content, how to use headers and footers and all that junk) and to this day I find that. MS Office may likely still be around, but it likely won't look anything like it does now. If someone can't transition from having learned the generalized concept during grade school, to knowing specific applications during college, then. So point remains - MS Office provides absolutely nothing that K-12 kids needs, but that google docs doesn't already provide.
Further, with google docs they can collaborate easier - something our kids don't learn, even in college. They learn the opposite, really. basically the entire enterprise world. Most corporate documents are transient: they are critical for a very short time, until a high-level decision is made, and then they're basically landfill.
Contracts, sure, you might want to go back and look at them, but pretty much everything else is ephemeral. They use change tracking and comments, but hardly ever stylesheets. Documentation, particularly professionally-written documentation, on the other hand, needs named styles, and this is where OO, LO, and GD fall flat on their faces.
Word lets you set a style margin, where each paragraph-level object's style name can be seen at a glance. In other systems you have to hover or click or something on each object in turn. Editing or writing in this mode is a snap compared to OO, LO, and GD. Named styles are the only way that you can reliably get a reusable XML document out of a wordprocessor (ie not OOXML), and without proper facilities in the interface to manage styles, a wordprocessor is a dead duck.
But the handful of people who don't fit in that category set the standards, and they need features like tracking changes, comments, and stylesheets. The why on earth use Word? Have you ever seen someone actually use the Word Version tracking?
95% of business, version tracking for word files is to use 'Save As' Documentnew.doc, Documentnewer.doc, or even Documenttoday.doc, cluttering a shared network drive. Documents get mailed around, either to people not able to access the office network share (or even to people who are), local copies are created by the dozen and so on. I have to admit that MS office is really easy to use, but that often leads to the mess described above. There is nothing to prevent that but user education and discipline. We all know what happens when we have to rely on that.
The proper solution to those requirements would be LaTeX (or any other text based document source format, FormattingObjects, whatever) and SVN. Perhaps combined with a pdf-based archive to documeht incomming/outgoing stuff. The 95% of business that you had experience with must have been from some bottom of the barrel places, intelectually-wise.
In the three companies I've worked for in the last 12 years (the last two counting 10k employees), the 'track changes' functionality, along with all related stuff (review comments, automated tracked change merging, accept/reject) was in active, constant use as an integrated part of work processes and culture. This extended to all of those companies' partners throughout any collabo.
In the three companies I've worked for in the last 12 years (the last two counting 10k employees), it's only natural that it gets less of in issue in bigger companies. At some point you're crossing the line where buying and maintaining something expensive as sharepoint is worth its money and you tend to use specialized software for more and more tasks. There is nothing wrong with abusing excel as a database as long as e.g. Your inventory consists of a few hunderd items. (assuming you're keeping some kind of document hygiene like making sure the guy responsible for updating it knows which one is the master copy and backups are kept) But you should know when to stop doing that and get some real enterprise tools for the tasks at hand. And at 10k employees, you're WAY past that point.
What you should be aware of at that size is a backlash-effect when people turn to Excel-macros again to bypass enterprise software, because setting up that urgent report would be a 3 weeks paperwork-heavy process instead of 3 hours of Excel magic. (During my last 12 years, I worked in companys ranging from 50 to 250 employees. Usually owner managed and specialized enough to be global market leader in their field. I guess that's a difference between US and Europe.). Perhaps this would be too steep if you are a grandmother with limited resources who only wants to create a single page note about a missing cat and print it for her nearest neighbors. As a business, you want to be as sure as it ever gets that the important proposal that you are writing will be correctly opened by the soliciting party.
(In many cases editable Word documents are requested, not a PDF.) This. Google docs and OpenOffice/Libreoffice are low-to-midrange tools. They are WAY better than.nothing.
and much better than that stripped-down Wordpad tool that Windows gives you out of the box. I got through college just fine using OpenOffice and I still recommend it to people (if it's appropriate for their needs), but when something just has to work without problems I get the big tools out. MSOffice is professional grade and is what you use when nothing else will do. I got through college just fine using OpenOffice and I still recommend it to people It's perfectly usable for college, sure.
But I think it's doing the average college student a real disservice to recommend to everyone they use OpenOffice and not Word. Think of the poor history major; unless they go on to some kind of advanced degree a proficient skill in Word may be the only marketable skill they have!
If a college student has never used word you have introduced a real hurdle to them performing well in any. Latex and GnuPlot saved my thesis. The Excel, PowerPoint, Word toolchain for advanced graphing particularly sucks. Gnuplot may be archaic, but it blows Excel away in graphing capabilities. WordPerfect for Windows is still better than Word for large document text editing. Latex is the only one that handles complex math in an easy to use fashion. Plus, Latex gives the ability to port the same document to multiple print styles, which WordPerfect only partially accomplishes.
Key problems: - Excel r. To be fair, it's not that the OpenOffice and LibreOffice are crap, it's just that the format you're feeding them is. Get us an actual free and open source document standard, and have folks follow it, and things will be much better. Here's an interesting anecdote: My moderately computer literate mother now uses Linux at home and Win7 at work, and prefers Linux. She takes her Linux laptop with LibreOffice on it to work because there are MS Word documents that MS Word won't open that LibreOffice does. That should counter your 'it's buggy' anecdote. Have you had many corruption problems with the FLOSS office tools saving and loading their own format?
Or is it just them failing to comply with MS's flawed published document standards that not even MS complies with? How can a FLOSS word processor work with MS Office if they publish one thing and do another? Oooooh, so now you see do you? Perhaps your fingers have been pointing in the wrong direction all along. Look, I know you don't give a damn why the competing free alternatives are buggy, but let's not go pretending they can't do the work. There is a deficit of CAD, but then again, look at CAD users as a percentage of market share vs total users. Then again, I actually prefer Blender and YafaRay for 3D modeling and animation and even just adding special effects to videos.
(Un)Fortunately this doesn't work both ways. Here, I'll show you: MS has no Emacs or Vim replacement at all! Who can even write code for their system? VS doesn't even work with my Emacs macros or have block select!
Ah, but you see? Emacs and Vim, and essentially every FLOSS program can run on Windows as well as any other OS - They're not hindered by vendor lock-in strategies. Or is it just them failing to comply with MS's flawed published document standards that not even MS complies with? How could they?
The OpenXML standard is more than 6500 pages long! Part 4, the Markup Language Reference, weighs in at 5756 pages - 5756 pages - to define 'every element and attribute, the hierarchy of parent/child relationships for elements, and additional semantics as appropriate' It's madness. Pure madness. No one in their right mind could claim that such a ridiculous, impossible-to-follow, standard couldn't (or shouldn't) be dramatically simplified! It should surprise no one that Microsoft fails to comply with their own standard - and why it's virtually impossible to produce an implementation that is completely compatible with Microsoft Office.
It's quite trivial for this to happen. Suppose someone writes a Word document (with the latest version of Word), then sends it to another person who has Word 97, who maybe opens and edits it, then passes it along to someone with another version of Word again. Somewhere along the line the document will get corrupted, as the classic Word format is just a memory dump of the objects that happen to be alive during editing. This is the reason why it's difficult for other word processors to read and write Word, they just don't have the exact same COM object hierarchy in memory. So they can only support a subset of the full 'format', but on the other hand they can often read a broken document much better than Word itself because they literally only extract the bits they need. It's quite trivial for this to happen. Suppose someone writes a Word document (with the latest version of Word), then sends it to another person who has Word 97, who maybe opens and edits it, then passes it along to someone with another version of Word again.
Somewhere along the line the document will get corrupted, It was corrupted right at the start, when the first person saved it as.docx - the colleague with Word 97 won't be able to open it. Oh, I hear you say 'Word 97 is old, they should buy the new one.'
Yes, and pay MS their extortion money only because they made the new format incompatible with the previous version for reasons that% of users won't appreciate. Contrast with OpenOffice, that is backwards compatible since forever. Aren't those documents created or edited by LibreOffice by any chance? Not in my direct experience.
MS Word format has never been fully standardized or had a robust API, standards for which features are compatible with which revisions of MS Word. The result has been absolute chaos with old documents, and is part of the reason that governments have tried to switch to an 'open' and documented format such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice use. Microsoft finally published an API, referred to as 'OOXML', to get by government requirements for documented formats. But the history of the lobbying to get OOXML passed as an ISO standard was a horrific abuse of a standards process. It should never have passed in that broken state,and Microsoft does not follow the standard they worked so hard to legislate.
The result is disastrous and unpredictable loss of document content. And LibreOffice can often recover content that MS Word cannot in such corrupted documents.
I tried OpenOffice of several versions, over the years, and all of them were buggy. The latest one, for example, corrupted the watermark in the document. This is unacceptable I agree - unacceptable.
However - try being in a situation where you are sending documents to an intermediary who translates the document into your client's language (and vice versa of course), and ending up with the document describing the 100 million euro project, CRASHING Word, as soon as the document crosses 100 pages. Then imagine calling Microsoft's quite expensive business support, asking for help, and flat out being told, that this is a known issue for documents that traverse different language installations, and that there is no forthcoming fixes for this bug, and that the work around is to keep the documents below 100 pages. At that point, it either becomes a beaurocratic nightmare to keep track of every piece of the 2,500+ page document, OR you simply instate a simple rule of always opening the document in Open Office, saving it in Word format again, and then opening it in Word, after which there were NO crashing issues with the large document. A few layout issues, but no one really cared about that. Granted, that was about 10 years ago now, and I have no idea why the hell that work around turned out to work, but THAT is a horrible type of bug. It is a show stopper, and quite frankly much worse than a watermark corruption issue. Now, do competing suites have issues?
Yes, they do. But for some reason the relatively trivial issues that they have always trumps the game stopping bugs that probably still exist in MS Office, simply because 'that's what everyone uses'. And this applies to all the dominant pieces of software. Doesn't matter what they are.
And in case you hadn't noticed, I seriously hate that attitude. This remark might seem insightful, but I wonder whether it is based on actual knowledge of Google's infrastructure. Let us not forget that some large companies, with many thousand employees, have gone over to Google Apps. This presumes that Google has a high degree of reliability. Assuming that taxi drivers have internet access via their smartphone, what is to stop them from, for example, monitoring a specific page or cell or whatever that pertains to them?
This seems vastly more reliable to me than setting. Why the hell would you use Google Docs for Taxi Dispatch?
Not me; but a prospective client of ours was using Google Docs, Gmail and Google Talk to co-ordinate the entire taxi dispatch system. We replaced his entire infrastructure with an open source based front-end, talking to a GPS-based location-tracker service provider. Now he has been able to reduce his workforce by 60% while increasing the number of taxis managed. But my point is; it is possible to do excellent real-time collaboration with free Google tools, at high reliability.
![Lotus 123 Release 5 123r5w Google Docs Lotus 123 Release 5 123r5w Google Docs](http://img.brothersoft.com/screenshots/softimage/l/lotus_1-2-3_password-32886-1.jpeg)
Which is simply not possible with Microsoft solutions, inspite of paying hefty sums of money. It has features that fit any conceivable needs Speak for yourself. I use Google Docs for lots of things, where Word simply does not fit. Daily time-sheets of my team members with details of work done, and time spent, with status.
Project progress of my department; which plugs into the that of the entire division. A taxi dispatch system uses Google docs to find out current location, availability, status etc using Google docs. Word is totally unusable in such scenarios. Are you talking about the ability to do real-time collaborative editing of Word documents here? Word (and Excel, and Onenote) has this already, and has for a few years now. Documents are stored 'in the cloud' but you get a local copy, too, for disconnected editing.
Any machine (or phone, yes even iPhones and Androids) connected to Skydrive gets the synced up copies too). Version history (up to 25 versions anyway) are stored. Hell, even the OS X versions of Word and Excel support real-time collaborative editing. You don't even need Office installed.
The web app versions of Office 2013 are free. In short - Microsoft has real-time editing of an Excel document by someone using a native app on Windows, a native app on OS X, and someone using Chrome on a Linux system. Your uses cases are supported just fine.
Are you talking about the ability to do real-time collaborative editing of Word documents here? Two key features: Cost and Convenience.
With Google docs, it is integrated with gmail and Google Talk, which provides a complete infrastructure to accomplish the needed collaboration. All that is need is a browser, be it Chrome or Firefox. With the Microsoft approach; I don't know. Maybe I need MS Office for all (not operable through Android tablets unlike Google docs), then I dont think it is inte. Google docs is great for a quick and dirty word processing or a collaborative project, but you shouldn't try to write a novel with it. I'd say the exact opposite. I edit a lot of novels, and every single author now uses MS Word.
Not one of them has a clue how to use any of its features. And really, to write a novel, you only need the simplest features. Business documents, with lists, bullets, tables, headings, etc, etc need more elaborate formatting. A novel is a stream of paragraphs. Maybe one or two heading styles, and block text (for things like quoted letters, poems), and a spellcheck. That's all you need and you can do that in any wordprocessor made in the last 25 years.
It was a lot simpler back in the days of Wordstar 5 and WordPerfect 5.1. Writers using Word have gotten less and less able to use it, compared to 20 years ago when people actually consulted a manual before trying. Now they just point and click and type, and so the vast majority just use it like a typewriter, and select text and style it from a button.
They are clueless of and intimidated by the vast number of features and just give up and don't try to work out how to use any any of them. Then they somehow activate one of Word's wacky, 'helpful' automated formatting tools and find all their text is in 24 pt red italic. Or they've somehow styled the entire MS as 'Heading 1' and have to override its style every time. Writers start new pages not by inserting a pagebreak, but by pressing 'enter' a few dozen times, or even worse, hundreds of spaces.
I spend an hour or two cleaning up all that crap with every file I get. If I was working with them over a long period I might try to educate them, but few want to learn anything. People now want every program to 'just work' without them having to learn anything. Writers need a simpler wordprocessor. Word has been getting worse and worse as a tool for authors since about version 2 for Windows 3. Its development us pushed by claiming more and more features. Features that just get in the way of 95% of users.
To disable all the crap you have to read up and tick off lots of little options. But it seems that also is just impossible for most users. So, not having used GoogleDocs, I can't say if it really is better, but if it has fewer features it probably is. Can hardly be worse.
I'll echo the above, but add that (unlike MS Office), Libre/Neo/OpenOffice also has a mature user interface. MS Office's ribbonwhatsit might arguably be 'better', but there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the old UI, and LibreOffice preserves it. It's familiar, and I can be productive with it. I can install LibreOffice on every computer I use: a Windows 7 system, a legacy XP box, and a Mac at work; my MacBook and Mac Mini at home; the TabletPC I mainly use for drawing; and it's even on my Linux serv. This is a reviewing / collaboration tool, not version control.
At any time someone in word can hit 'accept all changes' and whoosh it's all gone. These markups are fantastic, however where I work we use it with a separate document management system that does version control for us. We basically check out the most recent document, and the first thing we do is hit 'Accept All Changes' this provides us with a very clean slate. The final edited document is checked in and that way only the most recently changes are visible when you go and open the approved document. It also makes it very easy for the document reviewer / approver to see what has changed.
I've seen people try to use this feature for version control before. It quickly becomes a clusterfuck of uncontrolled rainbow colours and strikethroughs. Mod parent up.
Loudly: TRACK-CHANGES IS NOT VERSION CONTROL. Say it again: TRACK-CHANGES IS NOT VERSION CONTROL. 'Version' implies, well, a version of a document, a stopping point, a revision of the whole. Tracking a version of a document is a point construct; not at all the same thing as tracking the flow of changes over the course of a period of work. One is a node, the other's an edge.
One's a pixel, the other's a vector. Not the same thing. Both are really useful, but they're different. Notepad is good enough for most people. (I'm using it right now.) But some people need certain features in their work, and if a program doesn't have those features, they can't use it. He's a professional writer who writes books, and he's talking about whether Google Docs and Zoho Docs can do that.
A big book needs a style sheet. Otherwise you're taping lists of codes to the monitor, like we used to do in 1985. A writer who works with an editor needs Track Changes. Otherwise, the writer doesn't know what changes the editor made. They'd be better off faxing hand-written corrections to each other, like we used to do in 1985.
When Microsoft started marketing Word, they were competing with WordPerfect, which dominated the word processing market and did a pretty good job. So Word had to do an even better job. MS worked with people who used Word in every major industry, like law firms, to find out how they wrote and what they needed in their word processor. They worked with an American Bar Association word processing committee to write free manuals.
Lawyers sometimes write documents with line numbers. Law firms use all kinds of strikeouts and underlinings. Law firms use elaborate outlines.
If you're a lawyer, and the judge wants a submission a certain way, there's no excuses. When I have a problem with Office, I do a Google search and I find people who have left the answers.
Microsoft's web site, much as I hate to admit it, is an excellent manual in every version of Office. They paid a lot of very good technical writers what they were worth to explain it. (In fairness, they haven't been up to the same quality lately.) When I have a problem with Google, I do a Google search and sometimes find a bunch of guys trying to give helpful suggestions. I wonder what Google's paid tech support is like. If my job depended on it, it would certainly be worth $50 a year. I too would love to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice etc., just for the principle of open software, but I've tried them and they had little incompatibilities.
If you're working on a big project with other people, you can't take a chance on an incompatibility that will take an hour or two to figure out, or that you just have to work around. Some day they'll get there. There's a definitive book for anyone wanting to write a wordpressor.
It's called 'Harts Rules', and it goes into micro detail of, for example, how to layout footnotes that are bigger than the page they refer to. The real micro detail of every extreme case of layout and composting anyone might face writing a wordprocessor.
Google Docs developers should read it, as should Microsoft Word developers quite frankly. Docs is suitable for simple tasks associated with everyday writing, memos faxes, instructions, meeting notes etc, but to write books, particularly technical ones requires a bit more processing. Or is Google software getting worse instead of better? I tried so hard to like Google Docs and Drive but it's been so buggy for me (in their browser no less) that I simply can not stand to use it.
Worse still is the unfinished nature of EVERYTHING Google puts out these days. There is absolutely no polish to anything they have besides gmail. Gmail is fantastic but everything else from them is just terrible. The nail int he coffin for me on the Google side was the Google Drive sync client on OS X, it crashed constantly, failed to sync files all the time and used a crap ton of CPU time draining the battery of my MacBook Air. Not to mention the lack of a Linux client (still!) Add to the above the fact Google likes to just close shit down whenever they feel like it and I can never let myself get too deep into their ecosystem without worrying whether they'll just cut it off one day (Wave, iGoogle etc.) Google just can't seem to follow through on anything to completion. I'm neither a Google fan or an Apple fan, I own products from both (Nexus 7 and an MBA) so I don't think I'm biased.
I have to say, the two companies have the opposite failings. Apple lacks features but has polish while Google lacks polish while has features.
In the end I find myself more inclined to use Apple these days just because I have real work to do and can't dick around with all of Googles BS. That said, I don't see why anyone would use Google Docs. I guess for simple text files its ok and I hear the collaboration is good so maybe it has uses for a small subset of folks out there but I just don't find it useful. I combine Scrivener, LaTeX and Word for my writing and find my needs met quite well. Google is run by engineers, which is cool, I actually like that, but as a result, suffers from a lack of real world usability, polish and commitment. Google lacks focus in the right areas (they can sure focus on selling you to advertisers though).
I just don't see Google as anything but a search + email provider. Everything else I've tried of theirs has been lackluster and easily met by other options out there at a decent price without the privacy issues. Or is Google software getting worse instead of better?
Google is run by engineers, which is cool Maybe the wind started to blow in the other direction? I cannot say much for quality of software, but it seems like all services have gone up in price A LOT (gmail storage, google apps).
Maybe engineers are no longer calling the shots? Nothing wrong with charging for services or increasing the price, but when the price goes up a lot (or when the free 'small business' options just disappear completely instead of diminishing) that seems a little far. My experience says differently. I had given Google Docs a chance years ago, but it outright stank.
I couldn't image why someone would want to use it. Then a few months ago I started writing for a major tech publisher.
When I asked what file format they wanted they responded 'Word if you must but we love Google Docs'. So Google Docs it was. And I was very pleasantly surprised. It worked slickly, speedily and no unexpected surprises. (This is with Chrome on OS X.) Compared to the OS X version of Word, which reminds me that the The Spinning Beach Ball of Death is still a real thing, I almost overwhelmingly preferred Goog.
There are a few things it won't let me do that I'm used to. Captioning images is one. Which doesn't work well in Word either, but is apparently not possible in Docs. I also use tables a lot and the table formatting options stink. But otherwise I found it met all my needs and worked better and faster than Word. I've been using OpenOffice (and then LibreOffice, since around when it forked) for writing scientific papers for a few years now. For referencing I use Zotero which works really well ( I can't stand Endnote!!!).
Recently I had to switch to Word for a collaborative project and I absolutely hated the way it tried to take control of everything. The way LibreOffice handles captioning and just everything in general is much better than MS Word. The formula input and formatting is much more like Tex than MS Word t. My rant-of-the-day goes to Google (docs).
I also thought that after all these years Google must have built a robust and intuitive product able to compete with MS office in terms of feature and compatibility. And decided to give it a try (using the latest Chrome). Conclusion is disappointment.
Small docs lightly decorated (bold, italics, colors.) are usually ok either from MSO to GD or straight from/to GD. When it comes to create numerated chapters, margins, headers footers etc. You must count on your b. I think he is using the wrong tool for the job, and then blaming the tool. I don't know about the collaboration features, having never used them.
But Google docs was never (IMO) intended to be a replacement for a professional editing tool. He talks about style sheet feature in the professional writers world.
I don't know what that is, because I use Google docs for simple things. Sharing a to-do list with colleagues. Sharing a grocery list with my family. Short story writing in my spare time. Yes, a lot of professional writers need particular features - but MOST people don't. If you try to include features that everyone and their dog would want, you'd get a mess that is unusable, especially in a browser (I can configure MS Word to some extent. Change the layout, add shortcuts to the ribbon, etc).
The closest I have come to a specialized writing software is Scrivener - and I love it. It has features MS Word doesn't have. And I don't expect Word to have them. But that isn't Word's fault - not everyone wants a pinboard and notes section while writing technical papers. They want to send a letter to Grandma thanking her for the check. And while Word might have some of the features he wants, that comes at a cost - I think MS realized it when they made Microsoft Works. A simple Word editor, a simple spreadsheet etc.
It was much easier to use. But it tanked for reasons I don't know.
Maybe (pure guesswork) because the mentality while buying software is - 'I don't know what this feature is. But hey, I might want it some day!'
Do you expect Paint to have all the features of Photoshop? Frankly, I couldn't use photoshop because I found it too complex, and I use Paintshop Pro. But that isn't Paint/Paintshop's flaw - if I need the features, I'll find the tool that fits the job.
I recently used Google Drive with directory sync to 'collaborate' with two others on a presentation. It's not true collaboration in the sense of how multiple developers could use something like CVS and merge, but it was useful enough. LibreOffice will create a lockfile that is also synched, so at least can tell you if someone else has the document open. The process was: 1) Create a shared directory in Google Drive. 2) All team members installed Google Drive and synched that folder. 3) One member uploaded images to a subdirectory, another generated a layout in Scribus, another created copy. 4) Finally everyone uploaded PDFs to another subdir so everyone could view.
Normally we'd do this over a local fileserver but even though we were all sitting around the same table, it was just easier to do it via Drive because everyone was using their own laptops. I'm not a professional writer so LibreOffice is good enough for me. This is why feature creep happens in Word. Without all those 'pro' features, there would be no reason for most folks to pay a premium for Word when LibreOffice suffices. The fact that 'professionals' are using Word ( or similar ) for their work for quality output betrays the lack of their sanity in the first place. 20 years ago Microsoft-Word was a joke of a tool for legitimately professional publishing tasks, a Fisher-Price mallet in a world of steel hammers.
Back then it was LaTeX, Quark or some other probably-insanely-obscure DTP system, even WP5.1, but over the years people have forgotten how it was (probably with good reason though, none of them were all that fun and easy to use and never came with cheesy clipart). As a publisher, I still find ms-doc files to be inconsistent a lot of the time (especially from some writers) and almost always needs to be fixed up by selecting the text, copying in to a fresh file with a very strict style and manually reworking it; as opposed to LaTeX (hand generated or via LyX) where you can generate print-ready novels consistently without all the screwing around. It would seem we've traded the steeper learning curve for substandard results and since it's been happening long enough now, it has become the 'professional way'. Now get off my lawn!
Is anybody looking at this problem? Why does an export of any standard excel 'time format' (e.g. 1:30 PM or hh:mm AM/PM) NOT work? Google's 123 translation of a 'time format' to an 'hour format' and then back to a 'time format' works great; so, why can't we get the correct time format on excel exports (like we do on text, html, csv, pdf.)? Right now I can download a spreadsheet in csv format and then use excel's 'text to columns' tool to get the desired results. BUT why should I have to explain that to anybody that needs to download a spreadsheet?
Could it be that the excel team is too bogged down with timezone adjustments? Maybe it's time that Google takes this problem away from their excel team & assign it to someone else? Jaygame, 11:48 น.
Using the time format, if I double click in the box I get a calendar?????, and no useful results. I'm not even getting good results on a time sheet, subtracting time start from time finish - I'm getting things like 345:00:00 and 254:00:00. When I multiply result times a rate, I get the right answer, but the times all look wrong. They are entered as 9:00:00 and 16:00:00 and then convert to the three digit hour format.
I think Google has a long way to go to get their date and time formats functional. Beholder87 17/7/2010, 20:22 น.