Google Docs

Pros

Ease of use in document generation and accessibility features for students with I.E.P.s.

Cons

Sometimes there are limited templates for projects.

Pros

Google Docs delivers a great comprehensive package at zero cost. The ability for this software package to work easily across platforms and be so easy to use everyday has been a major plus and is why this is used on a regular basis to maximise output of my colleagues

Cons

There needs to be a tutorial package on the systems showing how to get the basics and most out of the system. For those who have used rival systems before it can take a while to adapt to the new system.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Google Docs

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Google Docs

Pros

To start, Docs get's everything you need done. Editing, typing, sharing—it's all easily done.

In a school or work environment, the commenting mode and ability to share documents easily makes working extremely efficient. In comparison, a traditional document editor would require you to manually send the file, have the other party edit it, then send it back. In docs, being able to instantly see any edits or comments another person makes is a huge time-saver.

Docs is also extremely compatible with other types of files, and even can transcribe PDF files. It's also capable of converting your current doc into other formats, which is helpful since you won't have to use a third-party website/application to do so.

While being a common feature in other editing programs, the auto save feature is handy, as it saves every time a change is made, even if it's just a single letter. On top of that, Docs also stores previous versions of your document, which I personally found very useful when back-referencing older revisions of essays and other papers.

Lastly, Docs runs constant grammar and spelling checks, which is great for when you are typing in a rush and misspell a word or type something out awkwardly. Not only that, but the detection is always improving, and is even able to detect proper nouns (like names) and recognize that they aren't spelled wrong because they are meant to be spelled that way.

Cons

Despite it's strengths, Google Docs holds a few annoying points.

A major disappointment lies in the lack of font support. While some of the major, non-standard fonts like IBM Plex Sans are available, a majority of the fonts that are available aren't well-known or widely used, which led me to using the same 4-5 fonts over and over again. There is no option to add third-party fonts either, which isn't ideal for those of us that have a selection of them on our computers.

Despite Doc's simple design, it's actually a huge resource hog for both internet bandwidth and RAM. While it may not be noticeable on a decent computer, it's especially noticeable on computers that aren't from the last 4 years or so. Loading Docs onto my laptop from a few years ago brought it to its knees, and forced me to use an alternative.

While Docs has plenty of shortcuts for its most commonly used tools, not every tool has a shortcut. On top of that, there are no options to bind our own shortcuts to a tool, which is a huge problem for those of us that have to write heavily formatted, non-traditional styled documents.

Lastly, table creation and editing in Docs is still yet to be ideal. Each line in a table is treated as a separate line, meaning that you have to either edit each line or all the lines at once, which makes it inconvenient to create visually appealing tables.

Pros

I think you probably have to live under a rock if you don't know the gist of how Google Docs works, but I love Google Docs and use it for everything at work. I work remotely and often need to have a number of staff work on numerous reports at once. Google Docs is seamless for collaboration, if someone messes up you can always go into the history and fix it, and sharing is easy. Additionally, the @ feature where you can assign a comment to a coworker is the best thing ever invented. Microsoft is trying to replicate, but their online sharing is such a mess compared to Google Docs, and their products are way too complex for the output they give you. I swear by Google Docs and Google Sheets at work.

Cons

The only thing Microsoft has over them is the spelling and grammar tool. Google's unfortunately is subpar at best. Whenever I need to do a grad school project, I literally type the whole thing in Docs and export it to Word just to make sure the spelling and grammar is up to par. I would love to not have to do that anymore, and I can tell they are working on it. Once they figure out how to improve that, Google Docs will be a perfect product.

Pros

As a writer, I need a quick and easy program to help me get my work done while not being hard to use. Google Docs is great because it’s easy, useful, and easy to format my work, find old documents, or send them to others.

Cons

There isn’t much I dislike about Google Docs. I wish there was an offline version I could download to my computer but that’s just cause sometimes my internet is down and I can’t switch documents during that.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Google Docs

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Google Docs