
A new Google Docs - hasanove
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/04/new-google-docs.html
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a2tech
This is very timely. My wife and I are huge google docs users and we were just
chatting over the weekend about how slow docs seemed to be with large
documents.

Docs has really replaced a lot of our use of MS Office. Its not a power users
replacement, but I have to give serious props to google for turning out a set
of web apps that are 'good enough' for the vast bulk of my uses.

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elblanco
I have to echo this. A team I'm on right now has managed to accomplish quite a
bit using a combination of docs for document editing and storage and wave for
side-bar communication and project tracking. It's worked really well so far.

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samratjp
<wishful thinking> How I wish I could save my docs in Dropbox and edit them
later on Google Docs </wishful thinking>

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jerf
It's easy, you hit "File -> Save" in the first app, then "File -> Open" in the
second app....

ooooh, right, web. Sorry. That's what you get when you walk into the walled
garden.

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jared314
Walled gardens are the new proprietary file formats.

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caryme
The standalone drawing editor may be really significant. It fills a gap that
isn't really met very well in the MS Office suite - a lot of people use
PowerPoint for these kinds of drawings, flowcharts, and posters, but it really
isn't ideal.

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snprbob86
You are forgetting Visio.

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whatusername
Which isn't part of office. (At least - it's not part of the version of Office
that most people have)

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moron4hire
Personally, I find Zoho.com to be a lot more feature-complete than Google
Docs. There are times when the document editor in Google Docs is downright
infuriating when trying to get the right formatting, but Zoho just seems to
work.

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mtinkerhess
I'm still waiting to be able to create a new document directly into a folder.

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sumeeta
So these are the results of the EtherPad acquisition?

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niravs
Seems unlikely. It's awfully difficult to integrate an acquisition like
EtherPad so quickly. I've read that they've been working on a real-time
architecture from the ground up for a while. Plus, I think the Etherpad team
joined Wave, not Docs.

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nikolayav
It's related to acquisitions in a different way. That was mostly an attempt to
put Docs(Writely) and Spreadsheets on as much common infrastructure as
possible.

You will remember that the original versions of these products were
independently developed and then acquired by Google.

Still haven't seen the results, but I assume they threw in a few features on
the way also. Docs had seen no interesting additions in quite a while despite
the very capable team. So now it is coming out of maintenance mode and will
hopefully add features _and_ stay relatively responsive.

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ugh
It seems there are fewer and fewer reasons for Google Wave. Maybe that’s the
better strategy anyways, bringing Wave tech to Gmail and Docs seems a lot
easier than swallowing Gmail and Docs whole as Wave seems to try at the
moment.

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lauken
Does anyone know if the new features are built on top of the wave? It looks
like wave was an experiment that is now being applied to the existing
products. Honestly, wave is useless in its current form but I am very excited
for these new wave like features.

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ugh
I don’t know and I should have written “Wave concepts”, not “Wave tech” :)

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billybob
If they fix the formatting issues with bulleted lists, I will be happy. (If
you haven't made and revised a lot of bullets on, say, a resume, you may not
have felt my pain.)

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ErrantX
The new editors look stellar!

However I really think they need to give the folders a bit of TLC. It's the
worst part of the google docs interface :(

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jakarta
I find Google Docs to be useful as a starting point. Nowadays I will start my
spreadsheets/financial models in Google Docs and then once I've finished,
bring them into Excel for formatting purposes to get ready to print. So far
this method works pretty well.

I'd love to do it all in Google Docs but the print formatting is almost always
messed up.

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jodrellblank
That introductory video makes it look so nice the only thing it needs now is a
proper desktop client to get rid of the chrome title bar and tab bar and
address bar and google menu bar and google docs title bar... ;)

Also: Bonjour / Zeroconf / simultaneous editing is _seriously lacking_ in the
LAN/desktop space. :(

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grhino
In chrome, you can create an application shortcut for a website, and it will
remove the chrome title bar, tab bar, google menu bar, and google docs title
bar when you open it.

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squidsoup
Any idea if there's any advantage to using Fluid in OSX over this approach?
Always happy to have one less application installed, and I'm finding myself in
Chrome more often than Safari these days.

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naner
A better way to edit the CSS would be helpful (right now it opens in a tiny
little box) since Google Docs screws up the formatting so often. As it stands
now, it is nearly impossible to make heavy changes to any document with tables
and nested bullets without going in and fixing the autogenerated CSS.

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billybob
I agree about the issues, but I think 'edit the CSS yourself' is not a
solution. I'm in the < 1% of people who'd know how, and I don't want to
bother. If I've got to do the formatting myself, I might as well just code
HTML - or more realistically, use a desktop app.

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JulianMorrison
I hate the missing no-distractions mode (hide controls) and the missing full
width view. This is the 21st century! Why are they emulating paper pages?
Sure, that's a view that might be useful. I don't want it as my default,
however.

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mazuhl
Ctrl+Shift+F to hide the controls. View > Uncheck 'Fixed width view' to ensure
you're ready. F11 to make your browser window full screen.

For further distraction free writing use one of these Firefox user styles:

<http://userstyles.org/styles/17366> <http://userstyles.org/styles/9889>

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JulianMorrison
Yes, exactly - but only in the old mode.

New mode doesn't have those features.

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aresant
"Edit" in regular document still doesn't work on iPad or iPhone dang it.
Spreadsheets does work.

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jhrf
Real time editing looks brilliant! I wonder how they pulled it off...

