Google launched docs.google.com around a week back which is a combination of two Online Google Applications : Writely(Google Docs now) & Google Spreadsheets. Before these two applications were separate but now, all your documents created in either Google Docs or Spreadsheets are shown in one interface which is very convenient feature for those who use (or planning to use) both of these applications. All your documents are stored online which means that you need not fear about power outages and hard disk failure and for editing/accessing your documents you need any computer with a browser and an internet connection.

The best thing about these Google Applications is that they are free, easy to use and you can have collaboration with others which means working on a same document or spredsheet with others at a same time. You can publish your documents as web pages which can be accessible to everyone or you can make them private. Documents can also be published to your blog and the tag assigned to the document will be used as the categor of the blog post. You can save files to your own computer in DOC, XLS, CSV, ODS, ODF, PDF, RTF and HTML formats.

There is also a plan to integrate Google Docs with Gmail. Let me give you an example. Suppose you get a Document or Spreadsheet as an attachment in your Gmail Account, you will have an option to open the files in Google Docs or Spreadsheets and make changes there. Google Docs is still in an initial stage and offers basic features but in time, I’m hopeful that we’ll see many new advanced features and more integration between the applications.

Google Docs has a potential to be used by Individuals and small companies and dump Microsoft Word & Excel but we have to wait and watch if these web applications can replace Desktop Applications which have become part of our work culture.

You can watch the Google Docs Tour here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 9:24 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.