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Wednesday, 21 April 2010 15:26 |
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A few days ago, Google Docs announced a number of new features, evidently in response to the looming launch of Office Web Apps, the web version of MS Office. - New Document and Spreadsheet features: Docs now supports little things, like a margin ruler, better numbering and bullets, and more flexible image placement. Meanwhile, Spreadsheets now come with a formula editing bar, cell auto-complete, and drag-and-drop columns.
- Higher fidelity document import: Google claims imported documents now keep more of their original structure, meaning less inconvenient tinkering.
- Speed: With faster architecture, Google says there's much less lag when working with large spreadsheets.
- New Collaboration Features. The feature which is grabbing the most attention, however, is the ability of upto 50 users to collaborate in real time, with different color coding differentiating between different collaborators.
However, all of these few features are coming at a price. Google Docs plans to drop offline support as of May, and it may be down for a while. This will be a great inconvenience for people who are outside the range of a wi-fi, traveling by place etc and want to work on documents even when they don't have internet access. For those who consider this to be a major turnoff, it may be better to continue to use a desktop based processing application like MS Word, and use a document management solution like HyperOffice, which works best with traditional file types.
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