Google Docs and Spreadsheet
This is a post coming to you from Google docs. Yes, Google has yet another offering to make your life simpler. Google now has Google spreadsheet and Google docs online. With Google docs you can create and edit a document, share it with others, giving them permission to either view or edit the document, and view revisions, so you can see what parts of the document you wrote and what parts they wrote. You can export the doc to the html, rtf, word, open office, and pdf formats. You can also publish it online, which basically means that Google gives you a link to the document that you can give to anyone to allow them to view it. Last but not least you can post the document to your blog, which is what I am doing right now. To post the doc to your blog you first have to give Google your blog settings. Once they know where your blog is and how to get at it, then you can just click a button and your document is added to your blog as a post. Very handy!
So Google spreadsheet allows the editing and viewing collaboration, but it does not yet allow you to publish or post to a blog. Hopefully those things are coming soon. They do however let you discuss with Google spreadsheet. Basically every spreadsheet has a chat room that everyone who is viewing the spreadsheet is automatically in. You can write whatever you want in the chat room and others viewing the spreadsheet see it. For some reason they don’t yet have this feature for docs, but I am guessing that it will soon be there as well. Most likely docs and spreadsheet were created by different companies bought out by Google, and the integration work is still taking place.
By the way both of these features are available from your gmail by clicking the link in the upper left hand corner. Google also indexes all of your spreadsheets and docs so they can quickly be searched by their owner and those who have rights to view them. Best of all, Google docs has a spellchecker! Oh yeah this just in as well: Google bought YouTube. Yay speedy online videos!
