John M. Wargo

I started playing with Google Docs the other day and I thought I'd share a little of my experience. I've been maintaining a long list of topics I want to write about here and it was filling up my task on my BlackBerry and desktop mail client. All of a sudden I had more personal tasks than work tasks and that's not good. I could maintain them in a word doc but then having access to the list from multiple places would be problematic. I use Second Copy to synchronize personal files between my laptop and desktop (which I'll write about in a few weeks), but I don't have many and it wasn't worth the effort to setup a new profile for just this one file.

I thought I'd give Docs a try to see how it would work for me and I found it to be a really good fit. I quickly logged in and created a list of all of my topics. The editor has all of the features I need and I can work locally then save the document in the cloud when I'm on the network. I can then access (and update) the file from my personal desktop at home and my laptop while I'm on the road.  I lose the ability to have the list on my BlackBerry (I haven't accessed Docs from my device yet, I'm assuming it won't work - no Gears client until Device Software 5.0) but that's not important to me since the only time I use the BlackBerry for this is to quickly add a new item to the list which only seems to happen on airplanes. I'll just add the topic to my tasks list then copy it over to the document when I can. No biggie.

I am seeing one interesting and annoying issue with the tool. I'm an expert Word user (sorry to brag) and use Headings to organize the structure of my documents and when you create a heading then enter a carriage return to begin the next line - for some bizarre reason Docs treats the heading and the first word that follows as the same word - and underlines it as a spelling error.

Printing is an interesting experience - when you print, Docs makes a PDF of the file on the fly and sends it to the browser. The browser opens Adobe Acrobat and lets you print, email, even mark-up the document. Pretty cool and a smooth feature.

My wife is going to help a friend create a resume tonight. I suggested Docs for this since my wife could help her create it then it would be accessible to both my wife and her friend. They can both work on it without needing to be in the same location. If it needs tweaking, my wife can make the updates and her friend could read it, email it or print it no matter where she is.

All in all, a good tool for me.