Google Docs

I know! I know! Some of you librarians do not like Google. I disagree. Unlike our patrons, I use it as one of the sources not as my only source.

I started playing with Google Docs – another of Google’s collaboration tools. I hadn’t seriously used it yet when one of my colleagues also brought it to my attention. That made me think about it seriously and wonder if I should design a class to teach our patrons. Think about it! You don’t need to buy Microsoft Office, can access it from anywhere on a computer and share your documents to be seen, worked on and edited at the same time from anywhere in the world. I recently published a paper on Google Co-op with a friend who lives in a different province. Check under My Publications. If you are co-writing a paper with a friend or colleague like I did, and you and your friend happen to live in two different parts of the world this would be a great way to collaborate. You could work on the same paper at the same time.

Panorama Software has partnered with Google to offer new capabilities to Google docs in terms of analytics, reporting and visualization process. You can analyze your data on spreadsheets using panorama’s pivot table. Click here for more on how to use Panorama Pivot Tables for Google Docs.

The three applications currently available on Google Docs are Documents (similar to Word), Presentations (similar to Powerpoint) and Spreadsheet (similar to Excel). You can share any of these withothers (or not) by inviting them as collaborators or just viewers. One important requirement is that you and your collaborator have a gmail id. Talk about marketing!

Your work can be saved and exported in any of these formats: DOC, XLS, CSV, ODS, ODF, PDF, RTF and HTML. From my previous posts you know I am also an indexer. Indexers are quite often asked to export their material in RTF format. If your old MS Office doesn’t have RTF, Google Docs does.

With my little exposure to this I have found that Documents lacks some of the features that MS Word has such as: a smaller tool bar, fewer font options, grammar check (Not that I use it much). I still haven't figured out how to present parts of the slide in a certain order with thier Presentation. The whole slide shows up at once. I want each sentence to appear one at a time as it can with powerpoint. I'll keep working.

Alright, I am beginning to sound like a free advertisement for Google Docs. So I’ll stop now and let you take a look.