Google Docs - A nice alternative word processing, spreadsheet and presentation application

I was a bit skeptical about Google's Google Doc application, but once I began playing with it I found that most of the general functions that I use can be found in these applications. I did bump into their limitations but for something available online in the cloud, these applications can fill a nice niche. Here is quick look at the Google Document Management Screen: Video Overview of the Google Document Mangement Screen. 

In the document management screen (overview of the file functions) you have the ability to download your document in multiple formats including a zipped HTML file, open document, PDF, RTF, Text, and Word format. Managed sharing allows you to set up individuals as collaborators or viewers of your documents and two email those individuals the site location of the document that you are sharing.

The publish command allows you to use this application to store documents that you can later push to your blog site. So you can work on a document and when you have it ready for publication you can then push is quickly and easily to your site. It works great with Google's Blogger and it has connections to other popular sites like Wordpress and LiveJournal. I tried unsuccessfully, albeit with out much real effort to push this up to Microsoft's blog program (which is what I use for my active sites) I will update this as I play with it a little more.

Other document management functions that you can apply from this screen includes Renaming the document, Deleting, Create Folders to manage your documents, and create spreadsheets, word processing documents and presentation files. The presentation program very simple, shareable slides that can be controlled from one machine to multiple connected viewing systems. If you were on the conference call, or speaking with the client, you could direct them very quickly to the document by sending them an e-mail pointer to the presentation document, and you would be able to control the speed of the slide presentation from your screen on theirs.  The one limitation that I found that bothered me, was that I was unable to share are a video from a site other than YouTube. Of course this would be the first connection that they would create since both are properties of Google. Even this has a limitation though, the video image control box will be shown on the slide presentation that you cannot controlled remotely.  This means it you can start the video you will have to have the individuals on the other side click on the play button themselves.  I inserted some links onto the pages and with that I was able to then give the users on the other side of the presentation the ability to jump to another video presentation URL.  So the real limitation here is the inability to control the whole presentation yourself, but, for a free application this is pretty nice.

Some other document control features that you have in this application include: uploading a PowerPoint presentation that would then be converted to this format, you can import individual slides from a PowerPoint file but individual animations are not imported. You can print the presentation, either to paper or to a PDF file, with or without speaker notes, and with a choice of how many slides per page. You can also save the document as a PDF document slide presentation the you can shipped out as well. The Publish button allows you to create a mini presentation module that you can insert into your site as a video module. My Live Writer Program didn't like it though.

I created a document that shows the basic formatting that you can do with a page and describes what you can expect and what the limitations are. You can see this more clearly if you jump to this video. You can see this document as a PDF file by clicking on this link.

I'll talk about the spreadsheet application as I have a chance to spend more time with it.