Google Docs is a word processor included as part of a free, web-based software office suite offered by Google within its Google Drive service.
So let’s dive into some trivia and facts about this service.
- Google Docs is a word processor
- It is included as part of a free, web-based software office suite offered by Google
- It is within its Google Drive service
- This service also includes Google Sheets and Google Slides
- They are a spreadsheet and presentation program respectively
- Google Docs is available as a web application
- Mobile app for Android, iOS, Windows, BlackBerry
- And as a desktop application on Google’s ChromeOS
- The app is compatible with Microsoft Office file formats
- The application allows users to create and edit files online while collaborating with other users in real-time
- Edits are tracked by user with a revision history presenting changes
- An editor’s position is highlighted with an editor-specific color and cursor
- A permissions system regulates what users can do
- Updates have introduced features using machine learning
- These include “Explore”, offering search results based on the contents of a document
- And “Action items”, allowing users to assign tasks to other users
- Google Docs originated from two separate products
- These were Writely and XL2Web
- Writely was a web-based word processor created by the software company Upstartle and launched in August 2005
- It began as an experiment by programmers Sam Schillace, Steve Newman and Claudia Carpenter
- They were trying out the then-new Ajax technology and the “content editable” function in browsers
- On March 9, 2006, Google announced that it had acquired Upstartle
- In July 2009, Google dropped the beta testing status from Google Docs
- In March 2010, Google acquired DocVerse, an online document collaboration company
- DocVerse allowed multiple user online collaboration on Microsoft Word documents
- As well as other Microsoft Office formats, such as Excel and PowerPoint
- Improvements based on DocVerse were announced and deployed in April 2010
- In June 2012, Google acquired Quickoffice, a freeware proprietary productivity suite for mobile devices
- In October 2012, Google renamed the Drive products and Google Documents became Google Docs
- At the same time, Chrome apps were released, which provided shortcuts to the service on Chrome’s new tab page
- In February 2019, Google announced grammar suggestions in Docs
- Thus expanding their spell check by using machine translation techniques to help catch tricky grammatical errors
- In a December 2016 review of Google Docs and the Drive software suite, Edward Mendelsohn of PC Magazine wrote that the suite was “visually elegant” with “effortless collaboration”
- But that Docs, as paired with Sheets and Slides, was “less powerful than desktop-based suites”
- Comparing Google’s office suite with Microsoft’s and Apple’s, he stated that “Docs exists only in your Web browser”
- Meaning that users have “more limited feature set” than “the spacious, high-powered setting of a desktop app”
- He wrote that offline support required a plug-in, describing it as “less convenient than a desktop app, and you have to remember to install it before you need it”
- Mendelsohn praised the user interface, describing it as “elegant, highly usable” with “fast performance”
- And that the revision history “alerts you to recent changes, and stores fine-grained records of revisions”
- Regarding the Explore functionality, he credited it for being the “niftiest new feature” in the suite and that it surpassed comparable features in Microsoft Office
- He described the quality of imports of Word files as “impressive fidelity”
- He summarized by praised Docs and the Drive suite for having “the best balance of speed and power, and the best collaboration features, too”
- While noting that “it lacks a few features offered by Microsoft Office 365
- But it was also faster to load and save in our testing”
- Google Docs and the other apps in the Google Drive suite serve as a collaborative tool for cooperative editing of documents in real-time
- Documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users simultaneously
- Users are able to see character-by-character changes as other collaborators make edits
- Changes are automatically saved to Google’s servers
- A revision history is automatically kept so past edits may be viewed and reverted to
- An editor’s current position is represented with an editor-specific color/cursor
- f another editor happens to be viewing that part of the document they can see edits as they occur
- A sidebar chat functionality allows collaborators to discuss edits
- The revision history allows users to see the additions made to a document
- Each author is distinguished by color
- Only adjacent revisions can be compared
- And users cannot control how frequently revisions are saved
- Files can be exported to a user’s local computer in a variety of formats (ODF, HTML, PDF, RTF, Text, Office Open XML)
- Files can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes
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