Over the past year or so I have been experimenting with my writing process and downloaded severasl apps. I have tried various methods and word processors. After reading power20marketing i was intrigue by there writings on google docs an excellent product article on how he managed there products and presentation, amazing free word processor from Google. I tried Gdocs many years ago and it was not for me. It seemed like a slow, underpowered, online , cutdown version of Microsoft Word. It was always good for communal writing but I don’t do a lot of that.
Google Docs has changed a lot since the first time I looked at. It has a document map that lets you navigate long structured documents. It works pretty much anywhere you can get an internet connection and I have an Android phone where it runs well. In general, I don’t recommend working on a phone, but it is useful if you need to refer to a work in progress when you are out and about or if you just want to do a readthrough.
You don’t have to worry about making backups because everything is saved in the cloud automatically as you type. If you setup Google Drive on your various computers, you can have local copies as well. You can also set individual documents to work offline as well. This is useful for those times when you do not have access to the internet. Because you can work in a browser, Gdocs is universal and you don’t need Dropbox synchronisation. It also exports well to many other formats.
The main advantage of Google Docs and one that I did not even think about until I used it is a simple one. It lets me use tabs. I can have my outline open in one tab, my notes in another and the document I am working on in a third one. It is easy to switch between them using the Control+Tab keyboard shortcut. If I needed to check my outline or a note on character or setting it was just a key press away.
I worked happily in Google Docs for a couple of months. I got a lot done but it had a major disadvantage which frustrated me. On low-powered computers it took a long time to get started, at least as long as Scrivener. In the end this caused me to look at alternative methods. I found working in tabs invaluable so I looked for word processors that would allow me to do that. I found them too but that’s a story for another day.
Much to my surprise, Google Docs proved a viable alternative to both Microsoft Word and i already created articvles and novels using it.I can imagine circumstances where I might go back to using it. I can even imagine using a Chromebook to get work done, which was not something I ever considered likely in the past.
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