21–30 of 53 posts
No. GDocs is one of the best pieces of software in existence. Each component is very capable on its own. The sharing turbo charges it past all others. You’d have to really be a google hater to choose not to use it.
One specifically negative thing about gdocs ... well ... gsheets ... is that if you create a document with many (e.g. > 5 or so) charts on a single page ... it will slow waaaaaaayyyyy down. Multi second latency/response times for things like scrolling, cell interaction, etc. It becomes effectively unusable. Gdocs as a whole are ok, though you are giving Google the right to read your docs as I remember (in their terms…
Surprised noone has mentioned OnlyOffice here: https://www.onlyoffice.com/ . We use it via the integration I wrote for Alfresco: https://github.com/cetra3/onlyoffice-alfresco
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ease of sharing is precisely why it's so powerful. I can send a link to a shared spreadsheet without the person having to login. Very little friction. Also, being able to co-edit in real time is very powerful. I think libreoffice offline is great, but for 80% of my use cases, gdocs is more convenient and useful. But I'm no longer comfortable with google having so much of my personal and business life.
Have you considered G Suite? If you are going to stick with Google Docs, at least you can get a legal agreement that bars Google from mining or otherwise using your documents.
GSuite is ok when it works most times, when it doesn't it's a nightmare. Google is literally the worst company I've ever done business with. In fact, over the past decade I've had to reach out to various support levels on different products and can say they stand at a remarkable 0% solve rate. (Chromium's bug tracker I've had some success with but it's not 100% a Google product)
The latest contract breech I've had with them is regarding their SLA agreement. We had a client's account become inaccessible for a week. This caused them 2 days of work downtime as their quotes and business correspondence were all tied up in the account. The SLA defines a Downtime as:
"Downtime" means, for a domain, if there is more than a five percent user error rate. Downtime is measured based on server side error rate.
We wrote about the issue, figured out the cause was likely due to an error in the half-assed rollout of the new admin panel (they currently have two in production), and yet we were not granted a half-month credit for the downtime as the SLA stipulated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you considered G Suite? If you are going to stick with Google Docs, at least you can get a legal agreement that bars Google from mining or otherwise using your documents.
What legal agreement? It's not like they won't weasel out of it anyway. I'm fairly certain they were scanning emails for ad targeting up until the past year or so. GSuite is ok when it works most times, when it doesn't it's a nightmare. Google is literally the worst company I've ever done business with. In fact, over the past decade I've had to reach out to various support levels on different products and can say the…
This is the agreement that I was referring to: https://gsuite.google.com/terms/dpa_terms.html
Specifically, see section 5.2.
Also, Google advertises this as a feature to G Suite users: https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650?hl=en
Org is a powerful-but-easy-to-learn document structuring language. You ca write it in any editor, but in an Org-aware editor your document really comes alive. The oldest, most feature-complete implementation is in Emacs. Org documents can be exported to virtually any final format.
I don't specifically recommend git so much as any distributed VCS, to share changes with collaborators in a controlled and structured way. I find it much easier to catch up on other's work when it comes as a self-contained, clearly labeled commit in the correct branch rather than a jumble of tiny edits here and there.
If you are working with lazy people who don't want to learn stuff, you may want to consider whether you'd be okay with keeping your private data with GitHub instead. If your Org document lives in a repo there, anyone with commit access can edit it in the GitHub web editor, with a formatted preview available.
For Google Docs-like tasks I prefer a combination of Org and git. Org is a powerful-but-easy-to-learn document structuring language. You ca write it in any editor, but in an Org-aware editor your document really comes alive. The oldest, most feature-complete implementation is in Emacs. Org documents can be exported to virtually any final format. I don't specifically recommend git so much as any distributed VCS, to sh…
Could you please elaborate on this?
I find it has more formatting features than Google Docs. Best of all: no Ads and document reading bullshit.