Google Docs

Google Docs is a free, online application which has word processing, presentation, spreadsheets and form functions. It is available to those who have signed up for a Google ID, which can be made from scratch, or adapted from an existing email address.

One of the great benefits that Google Docs has to offer is that it supports Real Time Collaboration with other people – a feature that has been the crux of Google’s new product, Wave. In a similar fashion to Google Wave, the beta version was available to a small number of people in 2006, but was finally released to the public in July 2009.

Google Docs is aimed to compete against Microsoft’s Office suite and Apple’s iWork package, with word processing, presentation, spreadsheet and form pages able to be created, imported and send via email. A great feature included is that a user can save their file in various formats such as OpenOffice, HTML, PDF, RTF, Text and Word.

Google Docs has support on most popular browsers, such as Firefox, IE, Safari and Chrome; and this means that Google Docs can be accessed and used on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux distributions.

Despite these benefits, users are limited in file size. Documents cannot exceed over 500k, image cannot be larger than 2MB and  spreadsheets cannot support over 256 columns, 200 000 cells and 99 sheets.

As well as this, being web based means that Google Docs can be targeted by bugs, which can jeopardise privacy in some documents. Although bugs can target any software, online applications are more at risk.

~ by chocstarfish on November 8, 2009.