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A new Google Docs

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168 pointshasanove54 comments

This is very timely. My wife and I are huge google docs users and we were just chatting over the weekend about how slow docs seemed to be with large documents.

Docs has really replaced a lot of our use of MS Office. Its not a power users replacement, but I have to give serious props to google for turning out a set of web apps that are 'good enough' for the vast bulk of my uses.

I have to echo this. A team I'm on right now has managed to accomplish quite a bit using a combination of docs for document editing and storage and wave for side-bar communication and project tracking. It's worked really well so far.

Docs has really replaced a lot of our use of MS Office

Really? Wow, I require WYSIWYG editing pretty rarely and even then I thought Google Docs / Zoho Writer was not enough, and usually had to resort to Open Office. However the latest round of improvements (like tab stops) will cause me to look again, and I definitely want to give the drawing app a spin.

<wishful thinking> How I wish I could save my docs in Dropbox and edit them later on Google Docs </wishful thinking>

That would be cool. There is an extensive GDocs API [1] and you could probably hack something together for Dropbox [2] (till the proper API is released....).

It's a possibility.

1. http://code.google.com/apis/documents/overview.html 2. http://github.com/tvongaza/DropBox

Dropbox API is on its way according to their forums.

Keep an eye out here: http://code.google.com/p/dropbox-api/

Apparently in private beta.

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=18111&replies=12

Thanks for the head up :-) There's a promising weekend project in here for sure.

There are a whole list of gotchas and problems that immediately spring to mind but it would be fun to see it hacked up.

memeoconnect.com seems pretty close to that functionality though I haven't tried it myself

Looks promising. But, then again, the reason why I wouldn't use it is because of remembering to open another app to upload etc. Dropbox helps me stay lazy :-)

It's easy, you hit "File -> Save" in the first app, then "File -> Open" in the second app....

ooooh, right, web. Sorry. That's what you get when you walk into the walled garden.

It's still convenient to have offline files be automatically imported and editable online and be able to pull latest versions offline if required. Yes, a poor man's version control for documents for the rest of us.

Walled gardens are the new proprietary file formats.

Given Google Docs' recent move to allow the storage of any file, I'm expecting them to come out with a Dropbox-like client that syncs to the Google Docs cloud.

If we are on this, isn't it then better to have your files in Dropbox and edit them with some native application like OpenOffice or Microsoft Office?

<plug>If you save your docs on humyo you can edit them in Zoho.</plug>

The standalone drawing editor may be really significant. It fills a gap that isn't really met very well in the MS Office suite - a lot of people use PowerPoint for these kinds of drawings, flowcharts, and posters, but it really isn't ideal.

Openoffice.org Draw has been providing this as long as I have been using it. However, Google making available online is very handy indeed.

You are forgetting Visio.

Which isn't part of office. (At least - it's not part of the version of Office that most people have)

Powerpoint is a rather amazing diagramming tool, if only you could make the page sizes larger.

Visio is the fallback, but I find working with it feels clumsy compared to Powerpoint.

I've seen many people print out 60" science presentation posters drawn in Powerpoint.

Not that I'm endorsing doing such, only that it's possible and common practice.

I've been instructed to do so in engineering classes. It feels weird.

I think that just like Excel escaped the boundaries of what it was intended for, Powerpoint is doing the same. You'd be surprised at how many enterprise architectures are captured almost in their entirety in Powerpoint.

OmniGraffle is the only good desktop app in this space -- nobody else even does * alignment guides*!

Personally, I find Zoho.com to be a lot more feature-complete than Google Docs. There are times when the document editor in Google Docs is downright infuriating when trying to get the right formatting, but Zoho just seems to work.

I'm still waiting to be able to create a new document directly into a folder.

So these are the results of the EtherPad acquisition?

Seems unlikely. It's awfully difficult to integrate an acquisition like EtherPad so quickly. I've read that they've been working on a real-time architecture from the ground up for a while. Plus, I think the Etherpad team joined Wave, not Docs.

It's related to acquisitions in a different way. That was mostly an attempt to put Docs(Writely) and Spreadsheets on as much common infrastructure as possible.

You will remember that the original versions of these products were independently developed and then acquired by Google.

Still haven't seen the results, but I assume they threw in a few features on the way also. Docs had seen no interesting additions in quite a while despite the very capable team. So now it is coming out of maintenance mode and will hopefully add features and stay relatively responsive.

It does seem like they integrated the faster refresh rate so you can see what your collaborators are doing in real time rather than every 10 seconds.

This was one of the features of EtherPad that the EtherPad team considered "a hard problem."

I think it's more likely these are the results of the Neil Fraser acquisition: http://neil.fraser.name/news/2006/11/01/

No, not in any way. I believe the techs are unrelated.

However, it's nice that google puts this up 2 days before they take Etherpad down. I'd be lost without it.

It might be that Google Wave thing.

It seems there are fewer and fewer reasons for Google Wave. Maybe that’s the better strategy anyways, bringing Wave tech to Gmail and Docs seems a lot easier than swallowing Gmail and Docs whole as Wave seems to try at the moment.

Does anyone know if the new features are built on top of the wave? It looks like wave was an experiment that is now being applied to the existing products. Honestly, wave is useless in its current form but I am very excited for these new wave like features.

I don’t know and I should have written “Wave concepts”, not “Wave tech” :)

For the forseable future, I think we can consider Wave a great sieve for innovation. It encourages plugins, which Google can pick and choose from to move into their other properties.

Reading that as "forceable future", when talking about The Big G, seems quite appropriate. :) But I guess you meant foreseeable.

If they fix the formatting issues with bulleted lists, I will be happy. (If you haven't made and revised a lot of bullets on, say, a resume, you may not have felt my pain.)

The new editors look stellar!

However I really think they need to give the folders a bit of TLC. It's the worst part of the google docs interface :(

I find Google Docs to be useful as a starting point. Nowadays I will start my spreadsheets/financial models in Google Docs and then once I've finished, bring them into Excel for formatting purposes to get ready to print. So far this method works pretty well.

I'd love to do it all in Google Docs but the print formatting is almost always messed up.

That introductory video makes it look so nice the only thing it needs now is a proper desktop client to get rid of the chrome title bar and tab bar and address bar and google menu bar and google docs title bar... ;)

Also: Bonjour / Zeroconf / simultaneous editing is seriously lacking in the LAN/desktop space. :(

In chrome, you can create an application shortcut for a website, and it will remove the chrome title bar, tab bar, google menu bar, and google docs title bar when you open it.

Any idea if there's any advantage to using Fluid in OSX over this approach? Always happy to have one less application installed, and I'm finding myself in Chrome more often than Safari these days.

A better way to edit the CSS would be helpful (right now it opens in a tiny little box) since Google Docs screws up the formatting so often. As it stands now, it is nearly impossible to make heavy changes to any document with tables and nested bullets without going in and fixing the autogenerated CSS.

I agree about the issues, but I think 'edit the CSS yourself' is not a solution. I'm in the < 1% of people who'd know how, and I don't want to bother. If I've got to do the formatting myself, I might as well just code HTML - or more realistically, use a desktop app.

They solved this problem by completely removing editing of CSS.

I hate the missing no-distractions mode (hide controls) and the missing full width view. This is the 21st century! Why are they emulating paper pages? Sure, that's a view that might be useful. I don't want it as my default, however.

Ctrl+Shift+F to hide the controls. View > Uncheck 'Fixed width view' to ensure you're ready. F11 to make your browser window full screen.

For further distraction free writing use one of these Firefox user styles:

http://userstyles.org/styles/17366 http://userstyles.org/styles/9889

Yes, exactly - but only in the old mode.

New mode doesn't have those features.

"Edit" in regular document still doesn't work on iPad or iPhone dang it. Spreadsheets does work.

Real time editing looks brilliant! I wonder how they pulled it off...

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