FREE Google Docs & Spreadsheets ‘Challenge’ MS Office?

By Wong Hing

Google Office? No..We called it Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets?

Simple. It is lightweight alternatives to Microsoft Office Word and Excel. Only that Google offer online free word processor and spreadsheet, and they allow collaboration...

Well, being able to jointly create and edit documents with others in your team - whether they're in your local office or remote location, is a huge benefit of the Google Docs solutions. It's worth a look if you're in this type of environment.

Another Google exciting feature is that it allows you to create documents and spreadsheets without the need to save to your local hard drive. But if you like you do have the option to save a copy to your hard drive.

Since Google Docs & Spreadsheets saves to a secure, online storage facility, you can access your documents and spreadsheets from any computer, anytime and, in the event of a local hard drive crash, you won't lose your saved content online.

Both of the Google docs and spreadsheets are still consider ‘basic’ at this point, but they're worth a bit of time to explore. Let see…

<>What You Can Do with Google Docs & Spreadsheets?

Here's what you can do with Google Docs:

• Upload MS Word documents, OpenOffice, rtf, or html.
• Use online editor to format documents, spell-check, etc.
• Invite others (by e-mail address) to edit or view your documents.
• Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
• View your documents' revision history and roll back to any version.
• Publish documents and spreadsheets online to the world or to just who you choose.
• Post documents to your blog.
• Download documents to your PC as MS Word, OpenOffice, rtf, pdf, html or zip.

The Google Spreadsheets also allow you to do the following:

• Import and export of .xls, .csv, and .ods formatted data (and export functionality for .pdf and .html).
• Enjoy intuitive navigation and editing, like any traditional document or spreadsheet.
• Use formatting and formula editing in spreadsheets so you can calculate results and make your data look the way you want it.
• Chat in real time with others who are editing your spreadsheet.
• Invite others (by e-mail address) to edit or view your spreadsheets.

At the moment, you need to pay attention on the size of your document/spreadsheet?

• Each document can be up to 500K, and up to 2MB per embedded image.
• Each user has a limit of 1000 documents and 1000 images.
• Each spreadsheet can be up to 10,000 rows, or up to 256 columns, or up to 50,000 cells, or up to 20 sheets -- whichever limit is reached first.
• Each user has a limit of 100 spreadsheets.
• You can import spreadsheets up to approximately 1 Mb in .xls or .odf format.

Since it’s online, then which browsers are supported?

Google Docs & Spreadsheets will work wherever you have access to the Internet via a Windows or Macintosh computer with one of these browsers:

1. Internet Explorer 6.0+ (Windows)
2. Firefox 1.07, 1.5.0.6+
3. Mozilla 1.7.12+
4. Netscape 7.2, 8.0

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is not supported, and probably won't run on other browsers.

Note: Regardless of your browser type, you must enable cookies and JavaScript.

To get more free information about how to use Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Microsoft Office, visit http://www.msoffice-tutorial-training.com