Online Observations

I use MS Office extensively and haven’t though I have tried to use Google Docs off and on, I haven’t been able to stick around on it. Still, I keep following what’s going on with the ‘Google Office’ just in case they make a break through which makes it easy for me to shift.

Despite all the claims where people say that Google Docs is not meant to be a replacement for MS Office and is a different offering all together, it seems that with every new enhancement it gets closer to office. Take for instance the latest additions to Google Presentation:

• Speaker Notes - now you can add notes to your slides in Google Docs. I use this feature a lot in PowerPoint, and this addition to Google Docs brings it closer to MS Office.
• Embedded Video - very recently, I made a presentation to a client where we had videos of our team embedded in the presentation. Google Docs now allows you to embed video into your presentations (you can only embed YouTube videos as of now, but that is not a big deal).

For a complete list of features that are now available in Google Docs, visit this features page. A quick view of these features suggests that even though Google Docs is not quite MS Office yet, but it’s surely getting there.