Google Docs is one of the coolest web applications ever (in my humble opinion). I am convinced that it is a godsend for anyone; blogger, writer, student or housewife. It solves a lot of problems that traditional word processors have, and adds some compelling features that any writer would love.
Less Clutter- Don’t worry about saving text files on your computer. Shoot, you don’t even need a word processor installed on your computer. I didn’t have one for a long time, and did fine without. They take up tons of space and memory, not to mention that they take more time to load than it takes my computer to restart. Seriously.
Easy to Organize- You don’t need to save your document in a physical location on your hard drive. Just assign it to a folder in G Docs and tuck it away. If you lose a document on your computer, you have to run a computer-wide search that a) takes forever and b) doesn’t always work.
Auto-Save- How many times has Word (or any other word processor, for that matter) unexpectedly froze? Or your computer crashed, and you lost all the files? This doesn’t happen with Google Docs. They’re automatically saved at timed intervals, so backups are frequent and never lost. In the event that (God forbid) Google’s servers crashed, they still have backups on other servers.
Aside from G Docs’ thoughtful built-in features, there’s still a lot of functionality under the hood that we haven’t tapped. In order to pull the most use from the online document editor from Google, you might explore these next features a little more.
Collaboration- The ability to share and edit documents in real time. I can’t tell you how many blog articles I’ve either written or helped edit with Google Docs. No more waiting sending the document by email and wiating on the other party to read/edit before sending it back. We’re talking real-time here. Saves hours (even days!) of waiting between revisions.
Revisions- Revisions are possibly one of the greatest tools for editing, especially when you’ve shared a document with another writer. Click on the Revisions tab and see who edited what and when. You can compare between versions, and check the differences. It’s also quite handy for the absent-minded writer who can’t remember why he changed something. Just go back to the revisions and refresh your memory.
Comments- You can insert comments as visual guides for you or anyone else looking at the document. Whenever I write an article I find it quite tedious to stop the flow and pull up another window and find the link for something. Totally counterproductive. Instead I insert a note that says “link here” and I know to come back and add it in the editing stage of writing.
Bookmarks- A very underused and misunderstood feature, the bookmark is quite useful for longer documents. If you want to link to another part of the document, just insert a bookmark, and then later on in the document you can link to that bookmark. It’s like an internal link. Very nifty, and especially handy if you’re needing a table of contents page.
Publish (blog or on Google)- If you want Google Docs to truly become your blogging command center, you should try publishing articles straight to your blog from Google Docs. All you need to do is head over to the “Publish” tab and set up your blog. If you want to add the post to a certain category on your blog, just label the article in G Docs with that same category. Poof! Your document has been published to your blog as well.
There are probably many other great ways to utilize Google Docs that I haven’t even touched on. Do you have any? Leave ‘em in the comments below!
Photo by bogdan.glushak
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