Why Google docs sucks! Friday, December 22, 2006
I quite liked Writely and was disappointed when the Google facelift was applied, but confess I never tried to write a big document on Writely. So my frustration and fury with Google docs may be linked to issues inherited from its predecessor.
As more of the daily activity move onto online applications, so some of the bigger documents that I have to write occasionally have finally made the transition. A big document for me is in excess of 20 pages.
I've had the same experience on both IE and Firefox.
Trying to do concentrated typing and formatting has proved impossible. Firstly, the formatting seems to have a mind of its own and ends up very haphazard. Insert a carriage return, save the document and wow, where did it go. Bullet points all over the shop.
But much worse is the auto saving function. You are merrily typing away when ZAM; the auto save kicks in as evidenced by a small indicator at the top right of the text box. I'm all in favour of auto save but not when it then proceeds to tell me that the text I've typed since it began unannounced needs to be reapplied and it then repositions my cursor to the top of the document. Perhaps if this was occuring every few minutes I'd be more tolerant.
As it is, I've found this is one area of my work that just isn't ready to migrate online until I switch to a different online word processor (Thinkfree perhaps).
Labels: "Google docs", "Online apps"
posted by John Wilson @ 9:10 PM Permanent Link
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2 Comments:
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At 8:49 PM,
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My sentiments precisely. I am writing much shorter docs than you (~1 page) and am frustrated by exactly the issues you describe. It's a great concept and I love the sharing feature (which is the killer app of Google Docs, IMHO) but as is, it is unusable. Honestly, I'm surprised that you were able to get to 20 pages...
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At 5:57 AM,
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Try Buzzword. It was being developed independently until Adobe bought them out. All of those bugs you described? Non-existant in Buzz Word.
