Google Docs is a favorite application of many people and many Ms Office users have already switched to it. How Google Docs differs from Ms Word and will Google Docs defeat Ms Word?

What is google docs

Google Docs runs in modern web browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome without requiring you to install additional software. Google Docs launches immediately by going to docs.google.com. Google Docs offers basic word processing features including paragraph alignment spacing and management, text color and font management. The Chinese and Korean character set is also supported by Google Docs. It is also capable of detecting wrong spellings but it does not correct them by itself. Google Docs has some more features that we will find out below.

Google Docs Features

One of the unique features of Google Docs is the easiness of sharing your documents among various different users and effortless authoring of a document by different writers. A document can be viewed and edited by multiple users by just clicking on the share tab, telling whom to share and telling whether that they are collaborator(having read and write access) or viewer (having read only access). A document can be viewed and edited by different users regardless which time zone they are in, where in the world they are.

Publishing a document on the Internet for all people to see is easy with Google Docs. To do this, after creating a document, go to the Publish tab and click on the Publish Document button. You can also choose to host your document via Google publish it on your Bloggers account (Google’s blogging application)

Google Docs maintains a history of all the changes (revisions) to the document by all the users since the start. This is useful because your can restore a file in case of an incorrect revision done by any of the collaborators or even a file corruption.

What Ms Word users would miss in Goolge Docs

Google Docs provides ease of quick and easy document manipulation, document sharing and collaborative document authoring. However, there surely are some good features that Google Docs lacks, such as:

When it comes to printing documents, Google Docs offers limited options because printing of online documents is done by your Web browser, which is outside the control of a web application. Google Docs has limitations in Web printing such as ability to change the margin width, paper size options, portrait/landscape options. These options are useful when document is downloaded and printed with applications like Adobe Reader or other desktop applications.

Everyone likes and uses the spelling and grammer feature but Google Docs only identifies a spelling and grammatical error but doesn’t fix it like Ms Word does. This isn’t very good news for Ms Word users.

Google Docs also not provides you with basic graphical objects such as boxes, arrows and circles with which creating flowchart become really easy. All what Google Docs lets you do is inserting of images to the document.

Misc features

Google Docs also misses features like format painter, and some other features we always used.

Google Docs vs Ms Word

Google Docs has its own plus and minuses but has really done well by allowing people perform their daily life's work processings online. This is something that Ms Word does not allow to its users. However Google Docs is a simple application that is not capable of performing complicated tasks. At this time, it can be said that Google Docs is not strong enough to defeat Ms Word. Yes, the Web version of a word processing application is fun and beneficial to those who are on the move at most times because they can now access their documents from anywhere in the world online while letting others to edit it at the same time. However, the features of Ms Word that it lacks are really missed.