Google docs: My own personal wiki on which to collaborate with others but . . .
Posted by Nicholas Gruen on Thursday, June 4, 2009
Google docs is a Good Thing. It’s not a great substitute for a rich client word processor or a spreadsheet, but both the word processing and spreadsheet parts of Google docs are great to have something simple in a cloud. Peach Home Loans and Lateral Economics operate from home offices around the place and in both cases, so where one wants to make notes in collaboration with someone else – to work up ideas for a paper or an agenda or whatever, having a simple page in the cloud that others can work on at the same time from different places is teriffic. As is keeping basic books from different locations.
I’m often telling people when beginning to think about things that we should each make lists of ideas in the same Google doc and away we go. Simple, not too clunky as so many wikis are, and away we go.
But there’s one thing really surprises me (or perhaps this just shows that I don’t know how to use some feature). Given that Google docs isn’t a patch on Word or Open Office as a word processor, it’s great strength is as a means of collaboration. But if that’s the case, you’d think that one of the first sophisticated features Google would have developed would be a ‘track changes’ facility, because that’s very very handy in lots of collaborative situations. I’m not alone.
So I bleg of you: tell me a collaborative word processor in the cloud that will enable me to track changes (and preferably also insert comments, though that can be worked around more easily).
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 11:08 PM and filed under Blegs.
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Why do you need track changes when Google Docs records every change as a new version of the document? You can “track changes” by comparing versions, and not just between the last saved version and a previous one, as in Microsoft Word, but between any two versions in the history of the document.
On the Google Docs page, select File >> Revision History. The version comparisons happen by clicking the “Compare ticked” button.
Posted on 05-Jun-09 at 6:28 am | PermalinkHere’s a few. Can’t personally vouch for any…
Posted on 05-Jun-09 at 6:57 am | PermalinkBecause they’re different functions. In track changes I know who’s added what as I’m going through it. Further revision history can only compare versions of the document at certain times, it doesn’t give you fine grained information about who added what when – or not at a glance it doesn’t.
Posted on 05-Jun-09 at 7:06 am | PermalinkGoogle Wave, coming out (hopefully) later this year, looks like it’ll have a lot of that sort of functionality – amongst numerous other nifty gadgets. If you haven’t read about it yet, I strongly suggest taking a look at it.
Posted on 05-Jun-09 at 4:41 pm | Permalinkhttp://etherpad.com/ does the trick, but the free version is a bit less than I was hoping for.
Posted on 09-Jun-09 at 11:11 pm | Permalink