Friday, November 16, 2007

Google Docs is Not a Shipping Company

Well, you know, as frustrating as Zoho was, it's a lot cooler looking than Google Docs, but it already knew who I was when I opened the site because I have a gmail account and I had already logged in there today.

There are some similar features but the interface is not in your face. That is good and bad. The view is less cluttered so may be less daunting to some, but you have to look behind tabs and drop downs to find some features.

You can insert comments in a variety of colors but they seem to be more intrusive; they don't disappear into a small icon when you finish. But neither do they duplicate themselves when you press enter and start a new line which is what happened to me in Zoho for some reason. There's no tagging.

You can track changes made to the document from the Revision tab. I didn't see this in Zoho, but I didn't look for it either. In both programs you can get contextual menus by right clicking. This is useful. You can collaborate on a document with others, and post to your blog from Google Docs as well as publish the document on the web for others to see, as in Zoho.

I had to search further to find the document settings and change the default font.

I think someone who wants very basic functionality and gets confused by too many options might like this better, but might get frustrated trying to find the document settings. The fact that the active document and the home page with saved files are in two seperate tabs may bother some. I like the way Zoho has it all on one screen.

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