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Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

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Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#151

Post by [deleted] »

snewman wrote: post #146
polote wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My bet is on Google Docs style, Also in the industry. My bet is on all of them. Some people prefer block based, some prefer text, some prefer Markdown, some don't care. Writing a book on Notion is impossible for now, but building beautiful pages is much easier in Notion. Microsoft and Google (And Atlassian) have all adopted the same strategy which is "Look more like Notion". I don't think that Microsoft should be w…

I'm one of the original authors of Writely / Google Docs, and worked on relatively heavy-duty word processors in an earlier life. I'd agree with you, and add that there are are a lot of other details that make Notion nicer to use. We made the move from Docs to Notion at work a year or two ago, and I've recently switched for personal use as well. Some of the differences are power-user things (e.g. easier to manage cer…

[deleted]

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#153

Post by elcomet »

cs702 wrote: post #38

A "pageless document that lives online" is also known as... a web page. Instead of creating web pages in html, css, and js, people will now create them using familiar "word processing" and "spreadsheet" apps on Google Drive. And these web pages come with nice fine-grained access controls -- authors can specify who is able to view, comment on, and edit their documents with a few clicks. Makes perfect sense.

What ? This is not a web page, this is a text editor with no page layout. It has nothing to do with a webpage. You have the implication backward (all web documents are pageless but not all pageless documents are web pages..)

Edit: I also thought your comment was sarcastic, my bad

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#154

Post by bushbaba »

tomasreimers wrote: post #107

I'm aware this isn't their primary use case, but the biggest feature missing from GDocs that moves me to notion / etc. is the lack of built in support for codeblocks. If they had that I really feel I would move most of my doc-writing here.

The way I've gotten around that is to create a table that's 1 cell, add inner-padding, and format it with consolas & 12pt ft...etc. Total PITA to do each time you want to copy in code.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#155

Post by bushbaba »

adrianomartins wrote: post #2

Welcome to 2022, Google Docs. Unfortunately there's still a long way to Notion or Dropbox Paper.

or QUIP. I've seen QUIP quickly gain adoption in the F500. QUIP is an easy addition that augments Microsoft's suite, and expands their existing salesforce relationship.

Kudos to salesforce on a great tool, and great enterprise positioning.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#156

Post by bushbaba »

samwillis wrote: post #21
chippiewill wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's utterly bizarre just how much Google docs seems to have dropped the ball. It really feels like they haven't developed the product in the past 10 years. This is the first significant feature change that I can recall in a very long time other than minor UI tweaks.

81% of Googles revenue is from advertising, only 7.5% is from Cloud Services (Google Workplaces and Google Cloud Platform) I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of that cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not Workplaces. So it wouldn't surprise me if its as little as 1-2% of revenue (it could easily be less than 1%). There is no surprise then that it is such a low priority for them. It's mostly…

>I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of that cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not Workplaces.

I'm not sure I'd make that assumtion. Google workplaces makes a lot of revenue. $20/user/month * 100k users in a large company is 24MM/year. I'm sure GCP will grow faster, but Google workplaces has had more market penetration for longer.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#157

Post by jessriedel »

lewisjoe wrote: post #150
ryandrake wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just hope the industry doesn't "move on" from print-focused word processing and start treating it like a second class citizen. Some of us target actual print: Books, technical manuals, posters, pamphlets, brochures, etc. and Docs is still basically decent "poor man's desktop publishing". Trying to layout a document for print when you don't have WYSIWYG page boundaries is a nightmare.

I don't think we ever will or even should ditch paper formats. It will always have its place in legal or any other industry that relies on formal documenting. My selfish reason: take the most popular paper format - PDF. A PDF created thirty years ago, is viewable today and will be preserved intact and viewable thirty years from now. I won't be able to say the same about a Coda or Notion doc. With all that dynamic blo…

But you could have made a similar critique of PDF 30 years ago: it started as a proprietary format vastly more complicated and fragile than plain text documents. Plain text documents had existed for decades and would continue to exist. Nonetheless, the benefits of the then-new PDF format were so great that it was eventually standardized.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#158

Post by morgante »

lf-non wrote: post #33
dpkrjb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried to print a Notion document? It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend. It's hugely underpowered and under-featured. It feels like Notion's demographic just dont need to share documents as documents. Notion would likely have put more effort into that feature if they did.

I am not a big fan of notion, but printing a document (even as a pdf) is an increasingly niche usecase in an increasingly digital-only world and I can totally understand if they don't put in much effort into it.

I haven't actually printed a document in years, but I export PDFs pretty regularly. When sharing documents with enterprise customers, it's far more reliable to share a PDF than to share a link to a document which is often restricted due to access rules on my side or firewall rules on their side.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#160

Post by bckr »

snewman wrote: post #146
polote wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My bet is on Google Docs style, Also in the industry. My bet is on all of them. Some people prefer block based, some prefer text, some prefer Markdown, some don't care. Writing a book on Notion is impossible for now, but building beautiful pages is much easier in Notion. Microsoft and Google (And Atlassian) have all adopted the same strategy which is "Look more like Notion". I don't think that Microsoft should be w…

I'm one of the original authors of Writely / Google Docs, and worked on relatively heavy-duty word processors in an earlier life. I'd agree with you, and add that there are are a lot of other details that make Notion nicer to use. We made the move from Docs to Notion at work a year or two ago, and I've recently switched for personal use as well. Some of the differences are power-user things (e.g. easier to manage cer…

> Notion just feels cleaner; I haven't really tried to analyze why.

There are fewer formatting options, but the options given are very opinionated. It is also really good at responsiveness to screen size.

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