Was wondering what everyones experiences have been with google docs, I seem to find more and more companies liking that I use this.
I love this discussion. I'm fascinated by the way people communicate with each other, and the way we use technology to communicate information.
Google docs is what it is. For those who haven't used the service before - it is a free service offered by Google. Essentially you can create, edit and store documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The documents are centrally stored by Google and are accessed remotely via the internet. So as opposed to the standard of editing your documents in Word, Excel, or Powerpoint, you edit Google docs in your web browser.
The service has some glaring drawbacks as well as glaring advantages. In my opinion, the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks in certain situations.
Advantages- Free - No cost, at all. If you wanted to throw everything into Google docs, you could do so and never worry about purchasing Word or Excel again.
- Centrally stored - No need to worry about flash drives or CDs, and if you switch between computers no need to worry about having the most updated version. You can access all of your documents from any computer with an internet connection
- Collaborative - You choose who has viewing rights and collaboration rights to your document. Anyone with collaboration rights can edit the document at any time from any computer with an internet connection. If you're editing at the same time as someone else, the document will update itself with your partner's changes as you both edit the document. This happens in near real time.
Disadvantages- Centrally stored - Yes, this is a disadvantage as well. Google owns your data. Google offers many free convenient services such as documents, google 411, maps/earth, calendar, etc... The convenience factor in a lot of these is out of this world and the documents and calendar service is a fairly major paradigm shift in how we communicate electronic data. These aren't just for kicks though. Google's primary revenue stream is advertising, and these free services are used to refine their advertising engine and build their advertising database. Any information you volunteer to google is going to be subsequently combed by their advertising engine and indexed for content and location (IP address). Example - if you've got a document stored that says "I love pizza!", you're likely going to be seeing more pizza ads on the internet. c45207 touched on this in a previous post and it's definitely something you need to think about before you begin using this service. This is the major drawback of this service.
- Connectivity - It does require internet connectivity, but this is becoming less and less an issue as our culture becomes more connected.
- Formatting - We all love Excel's powerful formatting tools, and I'm sure at some point we've all spent far too much time fussing over a small formatting detail. Formatting in google docs is fairly limited relative to what most of us are used to, though it has made some significant strides since the service's inception a few years back. There were at some point some difficulties with maintaining formatting while printing. These may very well be resolved by now, but a simple workaround is to save the google doc as a .pdf file and print that.
I love the service for little tidbits, notes and documents that require some collaboration. Something like a rehearsal schedule or production calendar where multiple folks need to access the document and have input highlights the advantages of the service. Something sensitive like a contact sheet, medical forms and financial information highlights the disadvantages. Don't want google indexing everyone in my cast's email, phone # and medical conditions or my personal finances. I'm sure as a large and well-respected company they've got some fairly stringent ethics policies about what is used and what is not, and who has access to what, but I prefer to keep sensitive information secured.
I'd be nervous as a company to use this as a primary source of document storage. There's a lot of stuff I would not want others to access.
Ultimately I think this service definitely has a place in the market, and over time we'll see some of the disadvantages of the service resolved.