Google Docs Templates
Everyone likes to bang on about how Google Docs is going to be the end of Microsoft Office, but people say that sort of thing all the time… 2008 is going to be the year of the desktop Linux apparently, or was that 2009?
Anyway I don’t actually mean to write off Google Docs, I use it myself all the time, however for very different purposes then what I use MS Office for.
Google rolls out new features every few months or so, and the latest is a welcome addition to the online office suite… templates.
I’ve actually wanted this feature for quite some time and although there has been the ability to style documents with CSS, I can’t be bothered with that, I wanted some templates like Office.
Now when you click New in the Docs menu you can select “From Template†and choose from hundreds of spreadsheet, presentations and document templates.
The document selection is actually very good and there is a lot of great professional looking templates as well as the usual letter/resume style personal documents.
The Presentation templates are a bit simpler then what you could find in PowerPoint, but good enough. Lastly the spreadsheet templates are very useful and there are a whole lot of invoice/financial ones.
Templates can be sorted in various ways. You can display all types or just for a single type such as spreadsheets or presentations. In addition to that, it is furthermore possible to narrow templates down by category, sort them by rating or most users, and even submit your own templates for inclusion.
To make use a template, simply click on the "use this template" button to do so. A preview is available for each template so that you can take a closer look before you make a selection in this regard.
Once you select the use this template button it is loaded on Google Docs. It is a bit unfortunate that you have to repeat the process each time you want to load the template as there does not appear to be options to load templates that you have selected previously quickly right on Google Docs without opening from templates first.
It will be interesting to see what Google rolls out next. Office Live, Microsoft’s answer, is just too slow for me to use at the moment, but Google Docs is not good enough to use all the time.
Oh cool! So didn’t realise this at all :) I have to admit I’ve only recently started using the ‘Word’ alternative of GoogleDocs and quite liked it, but having used the spreadsheet version on-and-off for quite a while, they have made some dramatic improvements to the interface.
p/s: Currently trying to figure out how to put currency signs in spreadsheet cells.
IMO Google Docs is no game for Office 2007. The comparison between the older office versions and Google Docs is possible, but the differences in office 2007 are just way to professional in comparison with Google Docs. And if I have to choose for an online version I like https://buzzword.acrobat.com more.