Google Docs & Spreadsheets review

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is built around the now-dead Writely beta word processor and the formerly solo Google Spreadsheets. This new online bundle has a clean blue-and-white layout that's pretty easy to get to know. The sign-in page displays your word and spreadsheet files in one long list. As with Gmail, content is organised in topical tags, so you can hide all files marked for 'family' when signing on at work. This service makes it perhaps too easy to take work home with you. Rather than having to clunkily email ourselves a file of a story we were working on, we just uploaded the text to Google Docs & Spreadsheets to make after-hours tweaks.

When you open a text file, layout tabs contain Edit, Insert and Revision functions, while a toolbar of graphical icons links to common editing features. After a couple of days of adjustment, weaning ourselves off of the Writely way, we finally got the hang of the interface. Although word count was hard to find in Writely, it's now conveniently located in the File drop-down menu. Bookmarks are better located as well, in case you want to set place-marks within a long document.

You can pick from many text colours and 19 fonts, and the Insert tab displays wingdings and international symbols in a handy box. That's all the formatting you'll need to write letters and memos for your office or household, as well as papers for school. You can insert images, but a report demanding snazzy graphics would be a better job for Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect. We also found it clumsy to work with text tables; you can't use the Tab key to move to the next cell, as you can with Microsoft Word. But we like the fact that clicking the Edit HTML link opens a new tab converting your document to relatively clean, Web-ready code. You can post to Blogger, BlogHarbor, BlogWare, LiveJournal, SquareSpace and WordPress blogs without leaving Google Docs.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets lets you apply various formatting styles and fonts to text, which is good enough for most writing tasks. But beefier desktop software is better for creating a polished professional report that's heavy on graphics.

If you're working on a spreadsheet, tabs arrange editing, sorting and formulas. Clicking More within the Formulas tab takes you to a nice list of abbreviations to insert formulas for maths, finance, logic, statistics and so on. Spreadsheets imports XLS, ODS and comma-separated files, and exports your work in those formats as well as PDF and HTML. We easily imported and exported files in various formats.

The most notable aspect of online software such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets is that it lets you grab and edit files from any computer with Internet access, then invite anyone to make edits or view a document. You can even save your work as a public RSS feed. Luckily, Google has made it harder to accidentally publicise your work than Writely did. Microsoft has still not found a straightforward way to let regular Office users share their text and spreadsheets with other people via the Web.However, Google doesn't yet offer a comprehensive productivity suite among its many online services. There's no PowerPoint-like applications, for instance, unlike the more full-featured Zoho suite. And while you can manage text files and spreadsheets within Google Docs & Spreadsheets' unified interface, other aspects of the service are unevenly integrated. For instance, Spreadsheets lets you chat live with collaborators on your file, which we used to double-check specific formulas; but Google Docs does not. The two tools also display document revisions in different ways.

You can simultaneously edit a spreadsheets and chat with a fellow user, which can save lots of time when you're working with tricky calculations and formulas. Sadly, you can't convert numbers to graphical charts.

We encountered some odd behaviour in our beta tests. For example, when we selected text in Google Docs & Spreadsheets and pressed Ctrl+I to italicise it, the toolbar's italics symbol detected the command, but the text didn't change. Still, other keyboard shortcuts worked, such as Ctrl+C to copy. And when we saved and closed a document, the browser window closed and didn't take us back to the list of files. Several times within Internet Explorer, we couldn't get a file to open when clicking on its link from the sign-in page.

Service and support is very good for this Web-based service, though not superb. Google provides a quick tour, a searchable online knowledge base, and user-guided forums for Google Docs & Spreadsheets. You can report beta bugs, but there's no email support to help you with unusual questions.

We expect that Google will gradually add layers of new features to Google Docs & Spreadsheets beta, eventually integrating with Gmail and Google Calendar, and more. Mobile workers and students who are always online might not require more than what Google Docs & Spreadsheets offers for free. But if you ever lack Internet access, there's no desktop version of Google's online services, unlike the rival ThinkFree. For now, Google's office applications make a great travelling companion to desktop productivity software.