"Frankly none of the Google Docs offerings holds a candle to Microsoft Office"
Word and Excel are great for individual productivity. If you use documents and spreadsheets as tools for collaboration, though, Google Docs is much much better overall, even though it's missing many features to which power users have become accustomed.
Sure, you can save a file to OneDrive and have multiple people working on it at the same time. But:
- In my experience, simultaneous editing via OneDrive (whether using the browser or the desktop apps) is more laggy and buggy than with Google Docs
- The commenting functionality is missing lots of features that are essential to my desired collaboration workflow:
i) Ability to give someone access to add comments and suggest changes, but not to accept changes or edit directly
ii) Comment authors are identified, and only they can edit comments they have written
iii) Comments can be received and replied to by email.
The way commenting works in Google Docs encourages collaboration in a way that the simple comments in Word doesn't. If you've not worked somewhere that uses Google Docs for collaboration, it can be hard to know what you're missing.
> If you've not worked somewhere that uses Google Docs for collaboration, it can be hard to know what you're missing.
I have (for a previous company), and it still hasn't proven worth it at other companies, including my current employer. We use Office 365 exclusively: it's not perfect but, as I say, Excel is streets ahead of Google Sheets in every other way, and that matters for our use cases.
So Google is "much much better overall" for multiple users, as long as you can dumb what you're working on down enough to fit Docs significant limitations. That's totally fair, but isn't a trade off everyone can make.
Yes, there's a trade-off. Note, I didn't say Google Docs is better for every use case. I said it's better "If you use documents and spreadsheets as tools for collaboration".
The key difference I'm talking about is between:
A. Writing a document, and sending a version of that document to one or more other people, so that they can do something with it. (This might involve sending you back feedback or suggestions.)
B. Sharing a link to a 'living' document, with which people can interact in different ways (comment, participate in comment threads, add change suggestions, accept/decline changes).
In my experience, B is much harder to achieve, and unlikely to happen organically, if you use Microsoft Office.
Has anyone here witnessed an organisation that uses Microsoft Office, and where significant progress is made on people's thinking, through their online collaboration on docs/sheets?
Word and Excel are great for individual productivity. If you use documents and spreadsheets as tools for collaboration, though, Google Docs is much much better overall, even though it's missing many features to which power users have become accustomed.
Sure, you can save a file to OneDrive and have multiple people working on it at the same time. But:
- In my experience, simultaneous editing via OneDrive (whether using the browser or the desktop apps) is more laggy and buggy than with Google Docs
- The commenting functionality is missing lots of features that are essential to my desired collaboration workflow:
i) Ability to give someone access to add comments and suggest changes, but not to accept changes or edit directly
ii) Comment authors are identified, and only they can edit comments they have written
iii) Comments can be received and replied to by email.
The way commenting works in Google Docs encourages collaboration in a way that the simple comments in Word doesn't. If you've not worked somewhere that uses Google Docs for collaboration, it can be hard to know what you're missing.