Office 2010 vs Google Docs

In yet another procrastinative distraction, I have been trialling Office 2010 (yes, if you work or study at UWA you are probably considered pretty bleeding edge for using Office 2003). The technical preview is not drastically different from Office 2007 although apparently the ribbon is more uniform across all applications now. You have to wonder if we have come to the end of the road as far as office products go? What more can they actually do other than have a word processor that writes the documents for you?

The technologies that really need developing are the web-based office tools. The main attraction of this is that the storage is all online. I can then access the documents from my computer, phone, netbook or whatever. Sharing is much easier and you get over sending documents via email, cluttering up inboxes and disks. I do use Google Docs – mainly for the spreadsheet function. The word processing is basic and if you have tried to import a word document – forget any formatting it may have had.

I wonder if anyone has written a thesis on Google Docs yet (that is physically on it rather than about it which I am sure someone in the US must have already done...)?

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