Google Docs

Pros

It is super duper user friendly, easy to integrate with other Google Apps/Productivity Tools, easy to share, store and manage.

Cons

Can be used online only. Need to add additional plugins for some basic features, like arrange bullet points in ascending order.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Google Docs

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Google Docs

Pros

I love that Google Docs is completely Free and is still a robust word processor that competes with and often outperforms its expensive competitors. I also love that is entirely web-based. I can access my documents on a whim from any device, at anytime as long as there is an internet connection. Finally I love how it integrates with the rest of the Google workspace online applications. The apps communicate back and forth really well and allow for endless possibilities to support business and personal activities.

Cons

What i like least about Google Docs is it's file management system. I would love to see my Google drive folders on Google Docs and be able to drag and drop files and explore folders from within the Docs app.

Pros

Google Docs is an easy-to-use word processing program. It has all of the needed elements to create and share a document of any size. It integrates seamlessly with other Google products. Sharing is an easy task that can be done for others to view or to collaborate.

Cons

The downside of using Google Docs is that it operates the majority of the time in the cloud, so no internet access can be detrimental.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Google Docs

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Google Docs

Pros

To start, Docs get's everything you need done. Editing, typing, sharing—it's all easily done.

In a school or work environment, the commenting mode and ability to share documents easily makes working extremely efficient. In comparison, a traditional document editor would require you to manually send the file, have the other party edit it, then send it back. In docs, being able to instantly see any edits or comments another person makes is a huge time-saver.

Docs is also extremely compatible with other types of files, and even can transcribe PDF files. It's also capable of converting your current doc into other formats, which is helpful since you won't have to use a third-party website/application to do so.

While being a common feature in other editing programs, the auto save feature is handy, as it saves every time a change is made, even if it's just a single letter. On top of that, Docs also stores previous versions of your document, which I personally found very useful when back-referencing older revisions of essays and other papers.

Lastly, Docs runs constant grammar and spelling checks, which is great for when you are typing in a rush and misspell a word or type something out awkwardly. Not only that, but the detection is always improving, and is even able to detect proper nouns (like names) and recognize that they aren't spelled wrong because they are meant to be spelled that way.

Cons

Despite it's strengths, Google Docs holds a few annoying points.

A major disappointment lies in the lack of font support. While some of the major, non-standard fonts like IBM Plex Sans are available, a majority of the fonts that are available aren't well-known or widely used, which led me to using the same 4-5 fonts over and over again. There is no option to add third-party fonts either, which isn't ideal for those of us that have a selection of them on our computers.

Despite Doc's simple design, it's actually a huge resource hog for both internet bandwidth and RAM. While it may not be noticeable on a decent computer, it's especially noticeable on computers that aren't from the last 4 years or so. Loading Docs onto my laptop from a few years ago brought it to its knees, and forced me to use an alternative.

While Docs has plenty of shortcuts for its most commonly used tools, not every tool has a shortcut. On top of that, there are no options to bind our own shortcuts to a tool, which is a huge problem for those of us that have to write heavily formatted, non-traditional styled documents.

Lastly, table creation and editing in Docs is still yet to be ideal. Each line in a table is treated as a separate line, meaning that you have to either edit each line or all the lines at once, which makes it inconvenient to create visually appealing tables.

Pros

Google Docs is my favorite. I use it everyday in some capacity--whether it is taking notes, collaborating with my team on a project, tagging outside organizations into a document, creating various informational sheets, etc. It works very well for our industry.

Cons

My only true complaint I have is the formatting when printing. If this could be fixed to work more similar to Microsoft Word, then I would have zero complaints.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Google Docs

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Google Docs