Home page: http://docs.google.com/

Status:

Google Docs is a web-based office suite. This review is in two parts: text documents and spreadsheets. The suite also includes presentations, but they do not (yet) support .ODP.

Text documents

This review is based on an earlier version known as Writely, before its acquisition by Google.

Reviewer: Daniel Carrera

Review method: I tested this product on a few sample documents.

Notes: Files are limited to 500KB. Seems alright for simple documents (minor formatting problems). We couldn't open some of our sample documents because of the 500KB size limit (this included the tables test). Writely did manage to open a 700 page (444KB) document correctly.

Writely does not seem to default to any file format in particular and currently does not support OpenDocument Text Template .ott format

Additional Notes: (Jean Weber, January 2007) I tested Google Docs and found no substantial difference in handling of ODT files from Daniel's earlier review of Writely. Page breaks get lost when opening an ODT file in Google Docs. I saved a file from Google Docs to ODT and it worked quite well. I tried a round-trip from ODT to Google Docs and back to ODT and that worked well too.

Spreadsheets

Reviewer: Jean Hollis Weber (21 Dec 2006)

Review method: I tested this product on a sample .ods spreadsheet. Later I will try exporting to .ods and report on that.

Notes: It successfully imported a multi-page OpenDocument spreadsheet (.ods) that had been created in OpenOffice.org. This file didn't have a lot of complexity (only some very simple formulas), so it didn't make much of a test for how well Google handles importing formulas, but formatting was fine: column widths, font changes, alignment, etc.