Tricks Google Docs Can Do That Office Can't

Can your office productivity suite do this? Paul Boutin spotlights four cool capabilities of Google Docs: group editing, OCR, language translation and self-updating spreadsheets.

"It’s been a year since Google formally released Google Docs, a free Web-based competitor to Microsoft Office with parallel applications to Microsoft’s Word (text editing), Excel (spreadsheets) and PowerPoint (presentations). (It had been in beta-test status.) Microsoft has since launched its own in-your-browser version of Office 2010, which I’m currently testing, but Google has built some wow features in to Docs that make it worth looking into as an alternative.

Four of them stand out.

Group editing – Have you ever huddled around one coworker’s desk to group-edit a file? Have you traded attachments back and forth in e-mail while on the phone with a co-author three thousand miles away? Google lets everyone sit at their own computers and gang-edit the same text, spreadsheet or presentation. Everyone sees the same copy of the document, and everyone’s keystroke-by-keystroke changes appear onscreen as everyone types. Microsoft has collaborative features in Word, but right now Google’s version is the winner."