heading2

A little while ago Google gave it's word processor an upgrade. I was pretty pleased with the upgrade, document conversion was much improved and this had always been an issue for me.

There were some other big changes there was a new drawing tool and the code base had been cleaned up along with some interface changes among other things. The document conversion improvement sold me and I adjusted my preferences to create new documents in the new version. Google had set up use of the new features as an opt in which seemed odd to me at the time. Now I understand why.

Just this evening I realized that while the document converter was much improved other features of the program LOST functionality. Most shockingly the feature that was "deproved" the most was the revision history and tracks changes functions.

This shocks me because Google Doc's collaboration features were the wedge which Google could use to introduce Google Docs to businesses.

Anyone who has gone through the hell of group "collaboration" using MS Word's Track Changes features knows what I am talking about. Track Changes in Word works fine when you are the only person editing the document. The problems occur when you need to work with others (which is often). Multiple version of the document get e-mailed back and forth to all parties and no one knows who has the "good" version of the document sitting in their inbox.

Google promised a better way and for a while they delivered. Multiple collaborators could work in real time on the same document all the while following along with the changes made by themselves or other collaborators in a easy natural manner that just worked.

More and more my advice to my users was to use Google Docs for any major collaborative project and when they did they loved it. Google Docs had a niche in the organization. No one was ditching MS Word but the value of Google Docs for group collaboration could not be denied.

heading3

This evening I was helping out one of our attorneys and our litigation director with an issue and I saw a way to use Google Docs as a workaround to a problem they were having. It was during this process that I realized how incomplete the new document editors features were. Google had complete ruined Google Docs usefulness as a collaboration tool.