How Far Will You Rely On Free Online Services? A First Look At Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Yesterday I had an important appointment to attend and just when I was ready to go, I failed to retrieve the location of the appointment from the Internet. Google was down together with my emails and calendar entries. Panic! At the 12th floor … I waited and waited and somehow many of the International sites could not be reached. Fortunately, the Google Gmail application installed in my 3G Wi-Fi mobile phone has a copy of an old email. From the email address, I figured out the company name. I did a search online at Yellow Pages and found the office address. Barely made it on time.

So, the question is, how far will you rely on free online services? And how much an online service can promise to deliver when there are many factors such as the network and infrastructure that is beyond control?

I love using Google’s Gmail. I think it is revolutionary to organise emails that bounce to and fro between multiple recipients into one single expandable conversation. No more “RE:” and “FW:” that cluster the mailbox especially when you have 20 recipients reply to each other putting everyone else into the copy list. With an application that enables us to read Gmail on my mobile phone, that is just sweet.

Impressed with Google’s Gmail, I was tempted to try the Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Microsoft Office dominates the market of productivity tools in both office and in some way, our homes. Almost all the documents created nowadays are in Microsoft Words format. Then came Sun’s OpenOffice that offers free applications in creating documents and spreadsheets and even presentation slides that can be saved into Microsoft formats. It is good news to home users like me because I do not need to pay for a software that I seldom use at home and since the same document can be read and edited in both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, I am not fussy over the occasional incompatibility issues (Microsoft is always one step ahead of OpenOffice for obvious reason).

Out of nowhere came Google that offers a documents and spreadsheets collaboration tool over the Internet for free. Forget about setting up a shared drive in your network to share the document editing task with your co-authors, forget about the clumsiness of sending the document to and fro for your friends to edit via email just because you all are not working at the same place, forget about setting up an access control to give permission to certain groups of people who can view and edit your document, most impressively, Google Docs & Spreadsheets allows you and your co-authors – whom you have invited – to edit the documents and spreadsheets simultaneously. The refresh rate is pretty impressive and you can literally see what changes others have made in real time. To keep a revision is simple and all the documents and spreadsheets can be downloaded and saved in Microsoft, OpenOffice, and PDF formats. And the real beauty of saving my work online? I can work on it almost anywhere that has an Internet access. The same way you can search for contents from the Internet, you can search through your documents’ contents efficiently like your very own little Internet space.

On the flip side, you would probably not to expect all the bells and whistles Microsoft products and OpenOffice offer. And the first question of this blog reminds: how far will you rely on free online services? I did panic when Google was down especially when I am current writing a novel using Google Docs. Having said all these, I still believe that collaboration via the Internet and having the flexibility to work on any computer still the future to be.

Related Sites: Google Docs & Spreadsheets, OpenOffice.org.