Article: Google Docs getting ready to challenge Microsoft Office

I started trying out Google Docs when they launched it way back. Google Docs did not have any significant change for a while, but since the announcement of Chrome OS and the push for cloud based storage Google has enhanced Google Docs significantly.



Making the online space more interesting, Microsoft launched the Office Live initiative, that gives all users 25GB of free space with the Live account sign up and with seamless integration planned between the next version of Office and the Online version.

Google has taken up on the challenge and has been improving on the user experience and features available in its solution offering. Today Google has rolled out some enhancements today to enable different capabilities

Filtering: As part of this change, the users can search and narrow down to the files required by searching based on type, visibility and many other criteria. In addition to that the files can also be sorted based on priority, just like the Priority mail feature that they launched few weeks back in GMail.

Preview: This update also enables th

e ability to preview documents on the right panel of the interface. The preview pane is based on live view and can show Spreadsheets, Docs, Images and even Videos. In the case of video, the uploaded file is automatically converted (possibly to YouTube like format) and readily viewed from the preview pane. The preview pane also gives you immediate information on the different labels, sharing permissions and version history of the document

It has been a while since I explored the capabilities of Google's offering and today when I tried it there are number of enhancements and the list is vast. Some of the key enhancements to highlight are

Mobile Editing: Google Docs is accessible from most Smartphones and in this feature, you can do editing of the documents right from the Smartphone. In addition to that the updates reflect in real-time across the cloud and across devices. 

Drag and Drop File Upload: You can import any file (not just docs, excel) into the Google Docs repository and use this as a means of cloud storage. The Image and Video files uploaded can also be previewed or played directly from the Google Docs interface. The importing mechanism supports drag and drop capability from the desktop directly, like any other folder.

Improved Revision's: Google has been allowing collaboration across users and allows multiple authors for the same document. When this is done, it is very important to have version control and the revision control has been enhanced and more importantly the interface to access the revisions available so far.

Cloud Printing: If you use Developer channel of Chrome and also have a smartphone to access Google Docs. Then you can do Cloud Printing of the docs to print the Google Docs to any of the printer that is configured through the services

Hit this link for the complete list of enhancements available for your use.

With some of these enhancements Google is definitely getting into the position of what OpenOffice meant for Microsoft. OpenOffice did not get adopted heavily, but Google does have the push to make this happen for them. One of the plug-ins introduced recently was to use Microsoft Office in Desktop and then upload them to Google Docs using a connector. If this works as advertised, then we can see more people leveraging Google Docs for their online storage.

Author: Vinod

Source: Google Blog