The Trouble with Google Docs (And How to Fix It)
May 8, 2008 – 6:08 pmI’ve been obsessing recently with configuring my home office software environment just so. Since I went all Apple, all the time, I’m able to benefit from a lot of goodies that are built into OS X (notably iTunes). And developing on Mozilla means that I can do pretty much everything from the command line, using XCode as my editor (which gets me zero hacker cred but works just fine). I never touch a spreadsheet if I can help it, and if I don’t have to make another Powerpoint-style presentation ever again I don’t think my psyche will suffer in the slightest. So my computers lack an office productivity suite that would sully my Microsoft-free lifestyle or force me to install that lumbering beast that is NeoOffice.
This delicate karma was shattered the other day when I needed to bang out an invoice for my customer. Rather than succumb to the siren call of office bloatware, I decided to give Google Docs a spin. What could be cooler than a free, lightweight web wordprocessor, I thought. Unfortunately the experience proved to be a deep disappointment.
Some issues were relatively trivial. For example, the clipboard commands don’t seem to work on Mac and kept prompting me to use the operating system’s keyboard shortcuts. Annoying but not showstopping. Much more serious was the table management, which is atrocious. I kept bumping into a bug that prevented me from adding normal text underneath my table; it just wanted to tack on additional rows. Resizing columns is a total nightmare and getting the text in the columns to line up properly went beyond the nightmarish into the realm of sheer horror. When I went to export my document as a PDF, it in no way resembled the “WYSIWYG” of my actual document. I spent what seemed like hours (and might actually have been hours) tweaking and exporting in a soul-sapping orgy of trial-and-error until I got something that vaguely resembled a professional-looking result.
So now I know why Google Docs hasn’t encroached more significantly on Microsoft’s turf: it kind of sucks. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need or want the zillions of bizarre features that traditional shrink-wrapped vendors insist of pushing on users in order to drive revenue from useless “upgrades”. But something as basic as table management should just work, and the exported output should look like the original document, dammit. Concerns about the dismal state of browser-based editors are not new, of course. Clay Shirky was frothing at the mouth years ago over the lack of auto-save (though modern web apps seem to handle that pretty well), and I’ve whinged at length about various other aspects of the same issue myself.
Luckily, Google has a weapon in its arsenal that is perfectly suited to addressing this problem: Gears. Gears honcho Aaron Boodman blogged recently about Google’s ambitions for the product. Basically, the idea is not to replace existing browsers or preempt nascent standards. Instead, it is a platform for providing missing functionality in a cross-browser manner while vendors and standards catch up. So how about it, Google? A really kick ass editing component for Gears would fill a gaping hole in current browser feature sets and give Docs a fightly chance of competing effectively with its desktop-based counterparts.
15 Responses to “The Trouble with Google Docs (And How to Fix It)”
Forget MS Office, OO and Neo Office. Just get iWork: Pages is really good!
Regards,
Rob…
By Rob... on May 8, 2008
You don’t need Pages. TextEdit, free and built into the OS, and from your descritpion probably does all you need and more. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s the OS X equivalent of NotePad or Wordpad. Apple doesn’t need to cripple it’s built in editing app to support a Monopoly.
For more advanced needs you may want to try the new OpenOffice 3 beta that’s just been released that has introduced proper OS X support without X11.
By dave on May 8, 2008
I have to presume you’re using Firefox. If you want cut/copy/paste to work properly, then stick this in your user.js:
user_pref(”capability.policy.policynames”, “allowclipboard”);
user_pref(”capability.policy.allowclipboard.sites”, “http://docs.google.com https://docs.google.com“);
user_pref(”capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.cutcopy”, “allAccess”);
user_pref(”capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.paste”, “allAccess”);
It’s not a Docs issue (though there certainly is room for improvement).
By wastrel on May 8, 2008
Have you tried Zoho Writer? I find better than Google Docs and should work better on Mac.
By Andrea Monni on May 9, 2008
Just try the newest OpenOffice 3.0 beta, it is now a real Aqua application, X11 is not needed anymore (bye bye NeoOffice).
By Pascal on May 9, 2008
Thanks for all the suggestions. I still think that OpenOffice is probably overkill for me, with or without X11, but I will take a look at TextEdit. Small, simple and built into my Mac are all good things. Zoho Writer is doubtless worth a look as well. I’m interested to see what they’ve milked out of the browser editing control.
Maybe I should do a run-down of different online editing solutions. In addition to Google Docs and Zoho Writer, Buzzword springs to mind.
By Matthew Gertner on May 9, 2008
And, I forgot to mention it, Zoho has also Invoice which does only what you needed when you used Google Docs.
And, as an added benefit, it should work well with Prim
By Andrea Monni on May 9, 2008
…and I thought you were such a big fan of HTML, which can even be used to design things like invoices
By Robert Kaiser on May 9, 2008
So is there a good WYSIWYG environment that I could use to make a professional-looking invoice in HTML? Or am I supposed to handcode the markup? I should probably mention that I am a design idiot so I need an environment that will hold my hand and help me to keep the ugliness factor to a minimum.
By Matthew Gertner on May 9, 2008
Okay, last post I swear but the new OpenOffice 3 beta has taken a leaf out of Firefox’s book and introduced extensions. There are already 2 different extensions to integrate with Google Docs:
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/taxonomy/term/50
One of them supports Zoho too.
By dave on May 9, 2008
I’m going to have to agree with Rob and disagree with dave. Pages (part of the iWork suite) rocks. I used to be the guy that never bought software (when i switched to mac) but after buying iWork for my family I’m totally addicted. It rocks. TextEdit is good, but it is no Pages. Numbers (their excel competitor) is also rather decent. I was able to teach my 50 year old dad in just a few minutes how to do formulas and all kinds of cool stuff.
Biggest beef I have with Apple apps right now is crappy address book/ical integration. They just don’t work together like they should.
By Jonathan Hoyt on May 10, 2008
Hey Matthew,
Thanks for the ping :). Yes, a non-sucky editing component is something we considered right from the start for Gears.
The main difficulty from Gears’ point of view is the deep integration between the editing features of current browsers and the DOM. Web applications such as gdocs have come to rely on such integration, and it would be difficult to supplant it with Gears.
We could do something like a black box editor, more like Editize or the way some authors use Flash. However, it’s not clear this would be useful to developers.
A harder, but ultimately better solution to this problem is to just lobby the browser vendors to put serious resources on fixing it. As I understand it, things are better in Firefox 3, partly because the contenteditable attribute has finally been implemented. (docs has not been upgraded to take advantage of it though).
By Aaron on May 10, 2008
Aaron,
What exactly is deep integration between editor and DOM needed for? In my (doubtless hopefully naive) imagination we would just drop in an editing component and it would spit out HTML or XML or whatever to the page.
By Matthew Gertner on May 12, 2008
IE’s ContentEditable and Mozilla’s DesignMode feature are implemented as DOMs that you can reach into and manipulate with JavaScript.
So lots of applications go and edit the CSS styles that flow into these subtrees, or do serious by-hand manipulation of the DOM in response to various events.
For example, drop-and-drop image manipulation is typically done by adding an image node with custom CSS and js behavior applied, inside the editable region. Similar story for highlighting, annotations, etc.
That kind of thing would be impossible with a black-box editing component.
By Aaron on May 12, 2008
I guess that if the component were good enough you wouldn’t need this kind of manipulation, at least in theory. And you could achieve some level of customizability with plugin attributes. But I can see the value of having access to a real-time DOM of the document. You’re doubtless correct that developers wouldn’t like a black box. So lobbying browser vendors is probably the best way to go, as you suggest. I’ll be curious to see how things improve once Docs has implemented the new Firefox 3 features.
By Matthew Gertner on May 12, 2008