Google Documents Now Online

Here’s the next step to Google’s going for world domination: Google Documents! Remember all those online office web apps that Google has been snapping up, like Writely, and apps they’ve created themselves, like Google Spreadsheets? Well, they’ve integrated these into a neat all-in-one package. For now, it consists of a word processor and a spreadsheet. Presumably, these are what have become of Google Spreadsheets and Writely.

We tried out Google Documents to see if it’s any good. Apparently, Google doesn’t lke Safari, or at least could not correctly detect browser versions (as far as I know, my Safari version is latest).

We tried adding the &browserok=true line to the URL and Google Docs just let is in fine.

We tried to create a new document and a new spreadsheet. Apparently, Google Docs does not support Safari yet for Spreadsheets, so on we moved to Firefox.

The Google Document writer looks just like your run-of-the-mill word processor. You have options for formatting, inserting special images and links, and also outlining.

What’s better than the usual client-based word processors is that Google Docs can be used as a collaborative tool, meaning you can ask your friends and colleagues to edit the document, too (as long as they have a Google account). And just like with a Wiki, you can track the changes on the document, and who made these changes.

You can even publish the text into a website (with its own URL). Or, if you have a Blogger account, you can publish the text to your blog.

As for Spreadsheet, it’s the same as the old Google Spreadsheets, just integrated into the Google Documents & Spreadsheets banner.

Spreadsheets features the same collaborative functionalities that Documents has. You can invite different sets of people to edit different document. So this means person A and person B can have access to document 1, but only person A can access document 2, and so on. The same goes with Spreadsheets. You can also assign who gets to have editing rights, and who has read-only rights to the document or spreadsheet.

Only one person at a time can edit a document, though. But the other members who are part of the “team” can view the document as last saved.

Who knows what’s in store for the future? Databases?