Comments on: Google Docs: one-year review

By: Massimo

Massimo — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 04:34:34 +0000

Give me one example of a situation in which this is going to be a problem, or even matter, to me.

By: transientreporter

transientreporter — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 02:57:11 +0000

Dude. You know all those manuscripts that you’ve been laboring over? You know all that data you and your students have so carefully gathered and meticulously analyzed? All those years of work?

um….

Google owns it.

By: Massimo

Massimo — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:37:32 +0000

OK, let’s see:

After Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive — the two most popular online storage services on the web — Google was late to the party by a number of years.

Dismissed.

By: transientreporter

transientreporter — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 22:08:39 +0000

You're right. It's not the same thing.

By: Cath Ennis (@enniscath)

Cath Ennis (@enniscath) — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 16:09:59 +0000

There are no equations in biology.

(not entirely true – the bioinformaticians have tons of them. But they use LaTeX, so I don’t have to deal with them).

By: Massimo

Massimo — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 09:08:07 +0000

I’ve dropped the final version into Word (at work) or Pages (at home) for formatting.

With tables and equations ? I can’t do that…

By: Massimo

Massimo — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 09:07:33 +0000

Nah, come on, it is not the same thing…

By: transientreporter

transientreporter — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 04:36:13 +0000

…you find yourself … working at many different places… on many different devices… and routinely needing to work collaboratively on a document with others… then cloud computing is not so much the best as the only way to go….

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude……

Dropbox.

‘Nuff said.

By: Massimo

Massimo — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 04:21:11 +0000

Who is searching my documents and for what purpose? Not sure what you mean, only documents that you want to share with everyone are searchable, I think... of course you have to trust that Google will keep your private documents private... to be honest, total privacy has always seemed like a pipe dream to me. I don't believe that this day and age anyone can keep anything private. I guess it is something with which I have learned to live.

By: Cath Ennis (@enniscath)

Cath Ennis (@enniscath) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 18:50:52 +0000

I agree about the lack of “polish” – any time I’ve used Google Docs for a document that needs to look good, I’ve dropped the final version into Word (at work) or Pages (at home) for formatting.

The collaborative aspect is great, though – I tried to implement it for grant application writing when multiple PIs are involved, but there was always someone who’d send me an edited Word file anyway. But collaborative spreadsheets are great for hockey pools