-Shawn

I’ve been using Google Docs (mostly the word processing and spreadsheets) for months to collaborate with teammates on MBA projects for school. I just recently tried Google Presentations to do a presentation for a class.

While I love this in concept, there are two major problems with Google Docs which keep me from recommending it wholeheartedly.

1) Formatting issues. When you upload Word Docs into Google Docs, I have often encountered major formatting issues. I find that Google Docs is good to “collect” information, but that the final “pretty version” still needs to be done in Word to make it look right. Footnotes via Google Docs are impossible… don’t even try them.

I found the same problem with Google Presentations. I had uploaded an existing Powerpoint into Google Presentations to find that hyperlinks (to videos), images, and other things were totally garbled or moved to the wrong slides.

If Google Docs doesn’t improve on this functionality, I can’t see using it for important documents that need to look nice.

2) Collaboration issues. I don’t know how to describe this problem very well but it mostly happens in Google Docs when more than one person is editing (or even looking at) a single document at the same time. If person one is viewing the document and person two is making changes, sometimes the changes that person two is making doesn’t get saved. I have encountered this many times while trying to edit a doc with a person who is sitting next to me with her laptop next to mine while viewing the same doc. An error message saying “Your recent changes won’t be saved” pops up. I have noticed that this problem is worsened with more collaborators. It gets REALLY frustrating.

One of the major benefits of Google Docs is the ability to collaborate; this really needs to be addressed as it really detracts from the user experience. When I have had (repeated) problems like this, I have resorted to downloading the file back down to Word and doing it the old-fashioned way).

There are a number of other smaller issues, mostly dealing with functionality, but for now I don’t mind them.

Another thing to note: Google Spreadsheets is nowhere near as powerful as Excel is; some of the formulas and calculations you might be used to in Excel do not work in Google Spreadsheets. (For now I have avoided using Google Spreadsheets for anything that isn’t a giant list.)