After The Dot Net

Google Docs and spreadsheets is to Microsoft Word what Gmail is to Outlook - speady, easy to use and functional!

The concept of “online Operating software” and “On Demand Computing” comes closer to reality with the success of products such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Google Docs and Spreadsheets is an online word processor that works like Microsoft Word. It has all the basic features of a word processor that are needed - spell check, text styling and sizing, line space control, multiple fonts and more. Some of the advance features are not available, for example grammar tool and support for American English in the dictionary tool is not available. But the advantages of an online text editor make up for that loss.

Since the software is online working collaboratively on a document is easier as two team members can work on the same document at a given point of time which is great with added feature of having your documents with you no matter where you are. As long as you have an access to the Internet through a computer you can access your documents from your account on Writely. If a team is working on the same document then a legend is created where the one can see who has edited what in the document which is great. There is great support for html elements such as block quotes , links and tables. Google Docs and Spreadsheets also supports Open Office format files which is great.

Though Google spreadsheets existed earlier the  word processor was developed by a Silicon Valley startup called Upstartle which was co-founded by Claudia Carpenter. The online word processor was called Writely and was taken over by Google in March this year because it made sense to colaborate the two tools to compete with Microsoft Office. Hence Google Docs and Spreadsheets was born. Lot of improvements have been made to the spreadsheets and the word processor part of the software.

When working with Google Docs and Spreadsheets you can save the documents in lots of formats, PDF being the most powerful and handy. You can also create a RSS feed of the documents you have at Google Docs and Spreadsheets which is a cool feature. There is a disadvantage as well as far as security is concerned. You would not like to keep sensitive information on the Internet because of security issues and though the web site does talk about the multi layer security on the website but I’m afraid that this is the only information available relating to security. However, for ordinary documents you can use Google Docs and Spreadsheets without any worries.