It is Thursday…and we are still celebrating Tuesday. Google Apps is our week long focus for Techno-Tuesday.
- Monday I did an Intro to Google Apps
- Tuesday Chris Hill discussed Google Calendar
- Yesterday AnnieLaurie blogged on Reader
- Today is Google Docs by my boy in Mexico…Wes Crawford
Enjoy today and come back tomorrow to learn about Google Analytics. – john
Wes Crawford – Follower of Christ; husband to Melissa; father of four little girls; field director of missionary team in Mexico; music director at Iglesia Bíblica Unidos en Cristo in Monterrey (United in Christ Bible Church), Mexico <check out his blog>
Google Docs
Microsoft Office is unquestionably the standard for productivity software. Any competitor must offer compatibility with Office file formats and a user interface with which Office users will be familiar, because, unlike media players or download managers, typically when we’re using Office it’s because we need to get something done. Microsoft charges anywhere from $149.95 up to $679.95 for various packages, but most people only use a fraction of the functionality that Office products offer.
In my own history as a worship leader for various church groups, I have used especially Word and Power Point almost every week of the year for over ten years now (since the days when we used to project lyrics with a slide projector!—but even those slides were made with Word). My folder full of Word documents with song lyrics has made its way through at least five different machines. Office has also allowed seamless collaboration between Windows machines and Macs, when, for example, Power Point files created on a Dell need to be passed to a Mac that’s connected to the projector. Now, as team leader for a missionary team in Mexico, everything needs to be documented, projects need to be collaborated on, and reports need to be reviewed—Office has been the standard for all that stuff for years now.
Since the release of Google Docs last year, my team and I have become partial to it for several reasons. Here are a few:
- It’s free and available to anyone with a Google ID (a gmail.com address).
- It offers the most-used functions of Word, Power Point, and Excel.
- You can upload documents and files created in Office to Google Docs.
- You can export to several different formats, including .doc, .pdf, .html, or .txt.
- Through Google Docs’ collaboration feature, we can all look at and edit a document at the same time each on our own machines.
- That collaboration feature, coupled with the online storage, means the most current form of the document is always available to everyone on the team anytime and anywhere they have an internet connection. (I know you can do this with Office, but I have never been a part of any organization that actually does it.)
- Many of the Mexican folks we work with here in Monterrey don’t have Office, so Google Docs offers us a free way to share documents with them.
Let me give you a few concrete examples. First, with regards to the collaboration feature, we can, during a team meeting, all pull up the same document and be simultaneously viewing and editing it. Instead of having a designated note-taker write everything down, often we brainstorm ideas all together, but each person can type his/her own ideas as they want them to appear. Then, periodically throughout the meeting, we say, “Is everyone on board with what’s in the document?”, and that way it becomes a more accurate representation of the whole group’s effort. To look at it another way, the visual communication clarifies the verbal, and then in turn the verbal communication make it to the page more accurately. Then we have a documentation that everyone can refer to in the future.
Another example: In my music ministry, we have several people who alternate choosing and leading music for the meetings. So I uploaded all my files created in Office into Google Docs, and then gave access permission to my guys. We have two folders up: one for chord charts (in .doc files), and one for lyrics to project (in .ppt files). Pretty soon we’ll start a master spreadsheet of all the songs we do in each meeting to keep a record of it. This way they neither have to start over making charts and lyrics, nor do they have to fork over thousands of pesos for Office (nor buy a pirate copy at the flea market down by the river bed—I kid not).
Here are some drawbacks:
- Internet access is often not as dependable here in Mexico as it typically is in the U.S., so you could conceivably get stuck without access to all your files.
- No fancy fonts.
- When I uploaded all my chord charts into Google Docs, the careful spacing I had done to get the chords positioned exactly over the right words was lost. All the chords we just pushed over to the beginning of the line with equal space between them. Anyone who has made chords charts is feeling my pain right now.
Let me offer one more example of the usefulness of Google Docs. About a month ago, all the USB ports on my Dell laptop ceased to function, and I was told by Dell tech support that I needed to update the BIOS. Problem was, my battery was totally dead, and the BIOS update wouldn’t work without a working battery. So, until I could get my home office to order me a new battery and have it sent to Mexico, there was no printing, no charging my iPod, no backing up, no transferring files via flash memory, etc. Awesome, right? (Don’t worry—I’m never buying a Dell again.) So imagine how glad I was at that point that I had uploaded all my worship charts and Power point files to Google Docs. Far fetched? Maybe, but it happened to me.
Of course, being a Google product, all your documents are completely searchable, so no need to keep everything organized in a folder system and remember where you put it. The convenience Google Docs offers more than outweighs the little bit of work it will take uploading oft-used documents on the front end.
If readers of this blog know of any other creative uses of Google Docs, leave a comment to let us know about it.
1 Comment
February 15, 2008 at 7:36 am
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