Microsoft Bashing

It has that one killer feature called "not from Microsoft" that is unbeatable.

One thing it does, however, that Word won't do is collaberative editing.

My boss and I worked together on some copy for distribution to potential customers. Between the two of us, we can make some very professional-reading copy for advertising our product line.

We used a technique of Google chat (for audio), and Google Docs, to work together on the editing. We'd look over a sentence, read it aloud, then try out something else, making modifications to the document real-time. That might prompt another approach, etc., until we had the document with the maximum amount of punch possible. If one of us made a grammatical error while writing out an idea, the other would fix it real-time.

I've never had a more productive editing session. You had to see it to fully appreciate it.

So write in google docs and copy to Word for formatting, etc???

We're an hour's drive away from each other most of the time.

And he took our collaberated writing and repasted it into another tool for distribution, so yeah, we don't use it as a proper word processor. I've found that I cannot get the documents it generates to work properly with my printer for some reason.

Some of the issues my wife ran into was lack of cut-and-paste between applications, and the need to enter unintuitive commands. Given a spreadsheet in Google Docs, it's apparently not possible to select a series of cells and then cut-and-paste them to another application--be that another spreadsheet program, a word processor, or even another browser window. We're using Chrome, too, so it was even more frustrating to not be able to cut-and-paste from a Google Docs spreadsheet in one window to Gmail in another window. Even in Gmail, cutting-and-pasting from a local word processor into a Gmail Chrome window didn't work either.
I could understand if it didn't preserve formatting or pictures, but nothing pasted at all.

I'm sure if we dug around some more, we may have found an alternate solution, but we were working towards a deadline, so we didn't have time to go researching on the web.

I really would love to be able to use Google Docs for all my office-related work. When something simple like cut-and-paste doesn't work, though, it really makes me wonder what other simple functions aren't working right.
Google Binder

Well, cut-n-paste isn't simple if you're working with a browser; when are you clipping mere web-page related stuff, and when are you actually getting the kind of data you want?

But then, I don't know how fancy web pages can be these days.

Still, I can see where it can be frustrating if you're working across applications like that.

One feature that Google Docs also has is "not made by Microsoft."

Made-by-Microsoft is a showstopper. If you're going to have resolve, you've got to stick with it.

IG: So much for right tool for the job, eh? :P

fleeb: I do agree with you about cut-and-paste not being so simple when it's in a browser window. It does make me wonder, though, how, or even if, Google solved this issue in Chrome OS.

To get somewhat back on-topic, though...Today I had to pull a mess of data from a web application we use for test tracking, and import it into an Excel spreadsheet. I noticed that Excel has a button to import data from a web page. I thought, "Great! This will save me some time." Of course, that opens up the web page in an embedded Internet Exploder window and our test-tracking web app doesn't work in IE!
AIIEEEEE! Binder

If a Microsoft product seems like the right tool for the job, you're doing the wrong job. It really is that simple.

Cut and paste *can* work with a browser window but it's dicey at best. Good web apps will offer you the ability to "download as CSV" or whatever format is appropriate for the data in question.

I saw a Microsoft magazine ad with a QR code on it today.

Have they finally given up on their proprietary "Microsoft Tag" format that nobody uses but them?

To follow up on that question, did they have to roll out an update to all the Windows phones to handle QR codes? :P

I'm pretty sure that the M$ tag reader app has always been able to parse both QR Code and Microsoft Tag; however, most non-M$ software only reads QR Code.

It's nice to see a proprietary format go down in flames once in a while, especially when it's one belonging to the Great Satan of Redmond.

Internet Explorer ads are starting to appear on television. Microsoft must really be starting to get concerned over its plummeting market share.