Google™ Apps Deciphered: Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop

Chapter 14. Things to Know About Using Google Docs

Google Docs is really great software, but people often think of it in the wrong way. Yes, it’s a free online office suite (unless you’re using Google Apps Premier Edition, but even then, the programs are free for everyone else) with a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program (named, respectively, Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations—who has the job at Google of naming programs? Fire ‘em!). And because it’s online, it has features that no other desktop-based office suite, such as Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, or Apple’s iWork, possesses. We examine many of those features throughout this chapter.

But some people line up Google Docs’ feature set against that ...