Google Docs – Ten reasons why your organization might want to take documents to the cloud

Google Docs is nothing new. But why should you take your documents to the cloud? Apart from Google Docs being free to use, there are ten more compelling reasons on why your organization ought to consider embracing the cloud by adopting Google Docs for your documentation needs – Read on to find out.

Reason #1 – Document Sharing:

Sharing a document with others will enable them to read your document and even edit it, if editing permission is given by you. So, your boss/ colleagues can view/ correct the document from anywhere and save it back.

People with whom you have shared the document will receive an email notification with the link to access the document. So, the document stays in one place (cloud) and different people can edit it from there. Isn’t it more efficient than sending the document to and fro over email?

Reason #2 – Online Collaboration:

It is possible for you and your colleagues to be simultaneously working on the same document – You can see what they are doing and they can see your activities, even though all of you might be physically located in different places. This can also be used by employees located in remote locations to keep a tab on the team-work progress, and perhaps even by your boss to know how much work you have completed at any point of time!

In fact Google Docs makes it easier to identify who has done what by giving different colours for the changes made by you, and the changes made by your colleagues, all in real time.

Reason #3 – Commenting & Chatting:

When multiple people are working on the same document/ work, it makes a lot of sense to have a live interaction between them which is visible to all the members. You can do it using the built in sidebar commenting system in Google Docs and if that’s not enough, you can even chat with any team member instantly – All this, right from within the document!

Reason #4 – Export Documents Offline:

Even though you can save and keep your documents in the cloud, you might still want to save a copy to your local computer folder/ external hard disk. You can just export the documents from Google Docs in any of the popular document formats like .doc, .xls, .ppt, .odt, .ods .pdf, etc.

You can edit these documents offline with MS Office, Libre Office or other office productivity suites, and export them back to the cloud when you are done.

If you think that sounds normal, Google Cloud Connect (plugin) lets you share and edit Google Docs from within MS Office & these edits are auto-synced to Google Docs Cloud as you are working on them. How’s that for a live backup? Google Docs even allows you to access any previously saved versions – Just in case you saved wrong changes in a document, and want to go back.

Reason #5 – Optical Character Recognition (OCR):

With Google Docs, you can import files in pdf format or even image format (that have text in them) and these files will automatically be converted into editable documents. I tried converting a pdf document into text – Except some minor errors in formatting, the document was quite accurately reproduced. That file was earlier saved into pdf using Open Office (Document) pdf export utility. You can export these files back to pdf format after editing them with Google Docs, if you want to.

Reason #6 – Forms:

What you see above is a form added by me to get a feedback from the readers on real time collaboration online using Google Docs. You can click on the appropriate box to give your opinion. Google Docs allows me to embed the survey in my blog/website. Its also possible to send this survey as an email if you are collecting feedback from known persons. Every form will get a unique URL.

When you vote, your results / comments can be seen by me either as a summary or as various entries in an associated spread sheet, so that I can make charts, etc to analyze them. I have added two types of questions above – Multiple choice & Scale (1-5), but there are some additional types of questions that can be added as well. Feedback is important for your business – Isn’t it? Forms make it easier to collect them!

Reason #7 – Themes:

Though I have embedded a plain form above, you can choose to have a colorful theme behind your form – just to make it livelier! Themes are quite normal for presentations, but they can now be applied to documents, spreadsheets, etc. I mean, how long can you keep staring at those black and white boxes? 🙂

Reason #8 – Mobile:

You can View and Edit your documents from anywhere (as long as there is an Internet connection) using Computer/ Laptop or even a mobile device like a smart phone (iphone/Andriod) / tablet computer (ipad) without having to install any software in them. In fact, you can even print a document from your mobile device to a cloud-connected printer back in the office!

Reason #9 – Publish to URL:

Any document created using Google Docs can be published to its own unique web address (URL) so that it can be accessed by others over the Internet. The URL enables you to publish your documents directly to your web-page in order to enable even your website visitors to see them. Of course, you can set up every document to be either private (or) available to people with the link (or) publicly available.

Reason #10 – No Hardware/Software costs:

In case your company decides to implement something similar, just imagine the hardware (servers/ networking) and software/personnel costs involved to get the whole set-up up and running! Besides, Google Docs even gives every user 1 Gb of Online server space free of cost, to store all the documents permanently on the cloud.

There maybe some disadvantages like sluggish performance over slow Internet connections, additional bandwidth costs, concerns of privacy/ security of storing important documents outside company servers, accidental employee actions like publishing a confidential document publicly on the Internet, non-availability of native offline access (which is expected to be provided soon), non-availability of some features available with popular office productivity suits, etc.

But if I had to decide for my organization, I would use Google Docs along with Libre Office to get the best of both worlds!

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