In early December I picked up my new Dell XPS M1330 laptop which I ordered without any Microsoft Office products preloaded on it. I decided that for a month or so I would try life without Microsoft Office and see if Google Docs could really fill in the void. After all, Michael Arrington said he couldn’t live without Google Docs, so perhaps I should try living with it?
The results weren’t as skewed as I thought they were going to be; I assumed that Google Docs would be an abysmal failure, but that’s not true for all of the applications that I used it for.
Google Docs Works Great for Note-Taking, Providing Ubiquitous Access to Small Documents
I take a lot of notes when I’m in class, doing research, on the phone with a potential client/employer; I just need a simple application that will let me jot down a few notes, save it, and let me recall it later. While the interface still isn’t as good as Microsoft Office’s (Google Doc’s spell checking blows,) the service works fine for recording simple notes and saving them.
Here are some of the advantages for using Google Docs for this Note-Taking application:
- Organizes documents chronologically, and in general, makes organizing files and finding them later infinitely better than MS Office and my local filesystem. This is probably my favorite feature of Google Docs.
- Makes all of your documents ubiquitous; I personally own four computers and I use several computers in the labs here at Vanderbilt. The ability to access my notes from any given machine is very convenient and saves me a lot of time that I would normally spend emailing documents to myself, downloading them, saving them, and opening them.
- Clean, simple interface.
Google Docs is great for what I call “vertical documents,” i.e. lists and other brief content that doesn’t consist of lengthy prose or contiguous blocks of text. It’s a good way to jot down a few links or bulleted lists. I’ve read a few converted Word documents to Google Docs, most of them consisted of full Wall Street Journal articles for my marketing class, and it can be a strain to read them in the Google Docs format.
Google Docs Sucks for Printing, Opening Existing Documents, Complex Spreadsheets, and Managing Large Files
The situation with Google Docs where I got burned the worst was when I was writing my final term paper at the end of the semester for an entrepreneurship class.
I had to scrawl out a 15 page term paper, double-spaced, with the default Word margins. The paper was due on at the beginning of class on Thursday. I sat down on Monday and wrote the first 12 pages of my paper; leaving the rest to do on Thursday morning. I uploaded my Word file to Google Docs and figured I’d be able to finish up my final three pages and print out the thing from one of Vanderbilt’s computer labs in the hours leading up to class.
I showed up at the computer lab and checked my paper length on Google Docs. It was only 8 pages long. Oh…. shit! Instead of easily wrapping up my paper I had to type in the typographic equivalent of a dead sprint in order to meet the page requirement. I printed out my paper and to my ever-lasting horror I discovered what had happened. I didn’t lose any pages or think I had written more than I actually did, Google Documents removed all of the margins from my document. Needless to say, I was a bit disgruntled, and since then I’ve never written anything of significance using Google Docs.
Here are some of the significant disadvantages of using Google Docs over Microsoft Office:
- Say “goodbye” to printing; Google Docs messes with the margins and doesn’t even compare with Word in terms of printing. What you see with Google Docs is not what you get when you print.
- Being unable to open existing Office documents that are shared with me via email for my classes and for my job is really, really irritating. In order to get it to work, I have to upload the existing document to Google Docs and convert it, so long as it’s not too large. The 500k limitation on Word files is ridiculous; a business plan explained in a Word document is always larger than 500k (for “for reals” companies, anyway.)
- Google Docs cannot handle complex Excel sheets; I have to use some rather complex Excel sheets for class and whenever I upload them to Google Docs I’m lucky if even ONE of the sheets gets converted correctly. Most of my spreadsheets have three or four different sheets included in them and Google Docs has, thus far, never converted all or even most of them.
- Obviously, Google Docs cannot handle large or complex files.
The Bottom Line: Google Docs is a Great Toy for Narrow Applications, But Fails to Compare to Office
The biggest disadvantage that Google Docs has is that it can’t work offline, but I know Google is in the process of correcting that. Regardless, an AJAX interface simply cannot accomplish the same degree of functionality, reliability, and performance that Microsoft Office has. In addition, Office documents are a ubiquitous format that everyone on Earth supports, which eliminates Google’s purported benefit of ubiquitous access through file type conformity, although Google Docs still has the benefit of ubiquitous data access (files don’t need to be replicated on everyone’s hard drive.)
Google Docs is great for taking little notes, but simply, you will not survive for long in an academic or professional environment without Microsoft Office.
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Comments 18
I think your post is a pretty fair assessment but I think you underestimate its value in a professional enviornment.
I run an IT department that maintains a little over 200 computers at this point. Using those computers are different levels of employees. Administrative positions need Microsoft Office, there’s just no doubt. I’m not going to put a finance person on Google Docs. But many of the positions that actually do the functional stuff only use the computer for basic word processing and never print out their work (they e-mail it). For them something like Google Docs is ideal.
So taking that into account consider this. We spend about $800 per PC when all is said and done and a lot of that is on software. I’ve been moving all our custom software to ASP.NET for several years now to the point that we’re about 90% there. So if we could find a Web Based alternative for Office we could move all of those people to cheaper Linux PCs that last longer (because they require far less horsepower than a Windows PC running Office 2003) and cost about $300
If we could use Google Docs on just the light office users I think it would save us about $173,000 every 5 years. That’s pretty darn significant and we’re just a small-to-midsize business. Corporations could easily save millions.
Unfortunately that great plan is thwarted until there’s a local version of Google Docs (think the Google Search boxes). I won’t have our corporate data on a Google server given the terms Google Docs give. (and yes, for the record I’ve thought of Zoho but with Google Docs breathing down their necks the way they are I just don’t have enough faith in the company’s survival to plan my strategy around them)
Posted 23 Jan 2008 at 5:58 pm ¶Hey Tom,
You raise an excellent point in regards to trimming costs for departments that don’t need the full functionality of Ms Office. In addition the notion of Google owning whatever documents you place on Google Docs is another concern that I overlooked. The point of my post was mainly speaking from my experience as a student (I only big limitation that Google Docs imposes on my professional work is the file size; I can’t read any big powerpoints or Word docs) trying to rely exclusively on Google Docs.
In addition, I’m not going to put anything on Google’s servers that I don’t want them to read, such as any financial data. Great comment overall, Tom.
P.S. Subscribed to your blog.
Posted 23 Jan 2008 at 7:40 pm ¶“Google Docs still has the benefit of ubiquitous data access”
Workspaces on office live is a great service and it´s free.
I think we´re going to se more services around office, and storing in the “cloud”.
I realy like office workspaces, and it would be interesting to se someone compare office live with google docs.
peace
Posted 24 Jan 2008 at 1:33 am ¶Google do have several good apps, but not all of them I would advice to use someother office suite like eDeskOnline or Thinkfree. For example, their Projects tool is too buggy and needs a lot of fixing. I choose to stay with eDeskOnline It’s got a perfect feature set and it works very well and also lets me Collaborate with others without any problems as it works (Infact) faster than Google.
Posted 24 Jan 2008 at 8:35 am ¶Hi Aaron, Sorry to hear about the experience with Google documents. Was interested to read your report on this as I sometimes use google docs in conjunction with the notebook. By the way, thanks for being a Dell customer. Hope you like the xps m1330
Posted 24 Jan 2008 at 9:18 am ¶@Per,
Forgot about Windows Workspaces… On both of my older Windows machines I used Office 2003 so I never got to play around with any of the Live! stuff. I’m going to get the academic version of Office 2007 so I’ll get to put my meathooks on that feature soon!
@kalivd,
I did not know about those services; very cool! How do all of those compare to MS Office though?
@richardatDELL,
My XPS M1330 is like owning a brand new Camero; I get compliments on how cool it looks on a pretty regular basis. One time my professor stopped midsentence during a lecture, came over to my chair, looked at the laptop for about 30 seconds and went “niiiiiiiice.” In addition I can’t imagine living without Windows ultimate now that I’ve used it for a couple of months; being able to use the Dell TV tuner to record my favorite TV shows while I’m off doing work is pretty cool. unfortunately I filled up my entire 120g hard drive within four days of recording TV shows; I guess I need to find a good external hard drive!
Posted 24 Jan 2008 at 11:11 am ¶You overlooked another good alternative to MS Office – OpenOffice… And that’s a good tip for the guy from the IT department – OpenOffice works great on cheap Linux boxes
Posted 24 Jan 2008 at 11:46 am ¶Re. your laptop – I consider it as my next laptop, the only problem that I see is that it doesn’t have a docking station …
@Aaron = Yeah, I think part of my point (that I badly articulated) what that, until technology like Silverlight or Apollo really blossoms I don’t think a power user is going to be able to switch in any meaningful way. I think its a solution only for the lower level users right now (which is essentially what you said just from a different slant). That said, you’d be amazed at the usability test results I get and how much they go up with online alternatives. The lack of features actually seems to improve the user experience for people who don’t like technology in the first place.
Oh, and thanks for the subscribe, but don’t expect much
The thing that has been most shocking to me is how hard it is to actually publish what you intended to. For instance, I really expected to have more code-based posts from the get go but I’ve found that I have to put myself on a schedule to make that happen. Anyway, it is not yet what I hope it will be.
@Arik – Thanks for the suggestion, we did look at OpenOffice and found that it didn’t offer enough of an advantage to switch. If I’m going to put people on a Linux box its going to be one where the experience is entirely browser based. If the end result of doing this is adding Linux to the products I have to support users on than it won’t be worth it.
Posted 24 Jan 2008 at 12:14 pm ¶@Arik,
I didn’t want to compare all of them, just Google Docs. OpenOffice might be a cool alternative though… Is StarOffice still around? And as far as the docking stations go, I don’t really use one anyways just because I’m up and off so much at college. I carry the laptop on me virtually at all times. When I’m sitting at my desk in my apartment though I have a big desktop with a GIANT LCD monitor that I use for a lot of casual browsing while I do gaming or coding on this laptop.
@Tom,
Yeah, I can understand Google Docs increasing productivity as a result of the lack of distractions compared to Office, but a lot of college professors and students (especially engineers) are heavy power users. Even my English professor is a total stud when it comes to using the Word editing/marking features, which in my opinion is a more powerful form of collaboration than what Google Docs currently provides.
As far as your blog goes, I understand that concern too. I originally bought the domain name AJAXNINJA.COM because I had anticipated that I would be writing a lot of .NET and AJAX code. I still showcase my Facebook.NET code every chance I get but really I’ve just grown more fond of talking about trends in the tech industry and doing some marketing analysis. In fact, I bought the domain name MARKETING-NINJA.COM and I will probably start rebranding this blog using that domain name, just so that way people aren’t surprised when they don’t see much AJAX on a blog called AjaxNinja. My current content and style won’t change though, plus I’m going to keep the AjaxNinja domain name since I get a fair amount of traffic going down it.
Posted 24 Jan 2008 at 2:50 pm ¶Thanks for the feedback Aaron, good to know
Posted 25 Jan 2008 at 11:47 am ¶@Aaron – I’m just like you, carrying my laptop with me virtually at all times. But when I’m at home (/office) I connect it to a larger screen, keyboard & mouse. I though of buying a desktop computer for my desk, but it seemed to me less convenient than using one computer (the need to keep them in sync).
Posted 25 Jan 2008 at 12:25 pm ¶Hey Arik,
I understand that issue with having two computers; keeping them in sync can be a problem. I typically do all of my work on my laptop computer and have all of my leisure stuff on my desktop (my music collection, video games, etc…) Having a docking station is a must for your situation though. What model do you use currently?
Posted 27 Jan 2008 at 3:23 pm ¶Currently every time I get back to my desk I just plug in all the cables myself (power adapter, monitor, USB hub and line out for audio). It’s more mentally frustrating than a real problem, I guess
As for your work style – don’t you prefer to write code on a bigger monitor?
Posted 28 Jan 2008 at 12:24 am ¶What resolution your laptop monitor supports?
Hey Arik,
My resolution is a wide-screen one; it’s 1280*800, on my laptop anyway. My desktop monitor is enormous; it’s got something like a 24″ diagonal. I prefer to write code on the laptop simply because my Desktop has Windows XP Home edition and can’t do a lot of the .NET stuff, plus the way it’s situation on my desk is a bit awkward for programming. It works great for playing video games though!
Posted 29 Jan 2008 at 5:25 pm ¶That’s funny because I’m just the opposite. I can’t write code without two monitors at this point. In fact, I travel with an LCD monitor just so I can extend my desktop when I’m traveling.
To me it boils down to two things. One, documentation is a vital part of programming and I love to be able to just look over and have it there. Two, I love having the ability to keep the old version of a site open as I code the newer version so I can see what I’m changing side by side with what used to be there.
Wow…I just realized this comment is completely off topic in regards to the actual post
Posted 29 Jan 2008 at 5:44 pm ¶Hey Tom,
I’ll look up documentation on my desktop sometimes from MSDN, 4GuysFromRolla, or whoever and do the actual coding on my laptop. The desktop resolution is enormous so it’s pretty easy to just glance over real quick at a screencast or something. However, a lot of the times I have to copy and paste code samples when I’m working with 3rd party components so in those instances its more convenient to have the documentation on the same machine as the one I’m coding on.
Posted 29 Jan 2008 at 5:47 pm ¶@Aaron – my laptop resolution is the same as yours, but I prefer to work with larger resolution. Although I agree that coding on a 24″ screen might be not that comfortable either (my external monitor is 20″).
I guess that Tom is right – we do got off topic
Posted 30 Jan 2008 at 12:11 am ¶Being off topic is fine as long as we’re having fun, as far as I’m concerned. After all I do own the place :p
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