eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Users can now access their documents and spreadsheets from a single control panel. The landing page shows a combined list of documents, along with the owners and contributors for each docume

Users can upload either a word processing document (.doc, .txt, .rdf and other formats) or a spreadsheet (.csv, .xls and .ods formats) to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

A new feature is the ability to e-mail information to a personalized e-mail address and have it appear as a document in the control panel.

Files in the word processing application can be saved in PDF, Word, OpenOffice and other file formats.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets word processing capability comes from Googles earlier acquisition of Upstartles Writely.

Users can insert items such as an image, link, comment or table into their word processing documents. It is still impossible to insert a spreadsheet, though.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets tracks revisions, allowing users to go back and work on earlier versions of a document.

It is easy to share documents with others: Simply enter a colleagues e-mail address and he or she will receive a link to the document. An RSS feed of the changes is also available.

Users also can publish their documents to the Internet for the world to see. (This function will probably make enterprises nervous.)

Users of Gmail will find the spell-check functionality in Google Docs familiar.

While we had no problems importing an existing .doc document created using Microsoft Office 2003, the formatting in the document was nonexistent in Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Google Spreadsheets maintains its earlier look.

Google Spreadsheets has built-in instant messaging capabilities that allow collaborators to discuss a spreadsheet as they work on it. Similar functionality is not yet available in Google Docs.

As with the word processor, the spreadsheet allows the owner of a document to share it with others. The spreadsheet does it in a different way, however, showing that, while the two applications share a control panel, there is no interaction between

eWEEK Labs e-mailed a sentence to our personalized Google Docs & Spreadsheets e-mail address to automatically create a word processing document.

We found our document in the control panel, and, when we clicked on it, the document appeared in Google Docs.

We then published the same document online for the world to see.