Thing #19 12-27-08

Thing #19: Apps, They're not just for desktops any more
I have wanted to try Google Docs for a while now and just hadn't gotten around to doing it. I see that it has the look of Word in many ways. I use Word when I am prepping documents for uploading to the UNL institutional repository (UNL Digital Commons Web site). I almost universally use Book Antiqua font there and I use the symbols a ton. The symbols list looks pretty good, but Book Antiqua is not a built-in font. I don't know if you could add a font some way. Otherwise, I am looking around at the menus and see that a lot of what I use in Word is available here, too (subscript, superscript, and some other formatting things). So, on the face of it, it could work for the preliminary editing that I do in Word. I do my final editing in InDesign, and I don't know of an app that would be like that.

I don't see of a way to place a new command on the tool bar. I went to the Google Docs blog and did a search on "toolbar" and still didn't see a way to customize the toolbar. Also, the paragraph formatting tools seem pretty meager in Google Docs, though I was able to do some fiddling with the paragraph spacing. So, I still prefer Word for my Dig Comm work, but I can see using G-Docs from time to time for other things. Or, I could start my work in G-Docs and then download the file as a Word doc and go from there. Good deal. It sure is handy--could use it at a public computer, for instance.

I posted this right from Google Docs, and then I added this one sentence with the Compose feature in Blogger. Easy and intuitive, wow.