Home » GaGa for Google Apps - A Review of Google's Project Management Potential

Google Docs

Needing that project management boost in your organization? Google Docs provides the perfect tool for group collaboration. The usual suspects are here: word documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Upload your existing office documents and edit them online. Document owners have the ability to give users outside their organization permission to view documents, or make changes. Documents made with proprietary software such as WordPerfect or Microsoft can be uploaded to Google and modified on site. For formatting with Google Docs you can now place content with CSS, but, while nice, does not give as much control as their desktop counterparts.

 

Mass Uploading to Google Docs
For organizations or users who would like to make their old documents available online, there are several third party programs designed to perform mass uploads to Google.

See here for more information: http://groups.google.com/group/GoogleDocs/web/mass-upload-downlad-to-from-google-docs

 

Google Docs Offline: http://gears.google.com/
A wonderful new feature released in April 2008 for Google Docs is the ability to read and make changes offline to certain documents. Using the add-on Google Gears, users can now read their Google Spreadsheets and Presentations when they are not connected to the internet. For word documents they can even make changes.

 

Drawbacks:

The main issue with Google Docs is that it is not Microsoft Office. The functionality parallels open office, where many favorite Word and Excel features are not included at present. Google docs lets you examine past revisions, but more sophisticated tools such as tracking changes with color-coded text, determining document reading level, etcetera are not available at present.

 

General Features for Google Docs

  • Save Advanced Searches
  • Embed YouTube or Google Videos
  • Organize Files and Folders in Tree Menu Bar
  • Revision History
  • Share Documents within and outside your Organization

 

Features for Documents

  • Format with CSS
  • Save to your computer as PDF, RTF, Text, Word, and Openoffice
  • Edit Offline with Google Gears
  • Spellchecker
  • Insert Bookmarks
  • Edit Html


Features for Spreadsheets

  • Read offline with Google Gears
  • Advanced Notification Rules (changes happen to cells, anything, collaborators, etc)
  • Create Formulas
  • Export Files as CSV, PDF, HTML, ODS, XLS, TXT



Features for Presentations

  • Read offline with Google Gears
  • Save to your computer as PDF, PPT, and TXT


Links
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/

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