Jianjun's Blog

Google Docs is Google’s online document processing and sharing application. With it, you can upload/create/share documents, spreadsheets or presentations. You have the choices to keep them private, share them conditionally or even publish them directly to your blog (Isn’t this cool?).

Protected with an encrypted access (https), your documents rest comfortably in their own folders. The tree structure on the left provides all kinds of filtering possibilities to facilitate easy search and organization. Change notifications via E-mail keep you up-to-date when a collaborator made a change to a shared document. ‘Changed-by-whom’ and ‘changed time/date’ information is also clearly visible from the document list. Unlike many web-based programs, Google Docs supports perfect context-sensitive right-click menus; you’ll feel ‘at home’ as if it’s an application installed on your PC.

I have been using Google Docs in my web localization work for over half an year. We set up a QA spreadsheet where web site staff put in user feedback or the latest changes for the localization team (translator and proofreader) to make necessary modifications or a comment.

Microsoft also has a similar online application – Office Live Workspace – as an extension to its Office software. However, its stability, speed and usability are far from comparable with Google Docs. I do enjoy its Office plug-in which enables direct save/opening documents to/from Workspace. Unfortunately, this is the only thing that is useful to me but at the same time ignorable.

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