A couple days ago I wrote a post about Zoho, which is an excellent productivity tool. While using Splashtop yesterday, I spent some time creating an office document in Google Docs, Zoho’s formidable competitor in the online productivity space. Google’s ability to create an amazing web product is, of course, legendary. Let’s explore Google Docs…

When you first get to Google Docs, you’ll see a central document storage area. This makes sense as the launching point for your productivity experience should be your stored docs. Where Zoho has a multiplicity of productivity tools, Google has three - Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations. Your documents get to Google Docs in a few different ways. First, if you use Gmail and get an attachment, you have the ability to open it in Google Docs and then it is automatically saved in your central storage area. Next, you can upload a document into Google Docs from your traditional OS. This is the way Splashtop users will generally upload their documents as there is currently no hard drive access from Splashtop. One limitation is that you can only upload a file under 500K. This might be a difficult limitation in the Presentation application where image-heavy files are a bit larger. Finally, you can create a new document right from the Google Docs central document storage area.

Here we’ve opened a document in Google Docs and have chosen the “edit” tab. You can see that this fairly streamlined user interface has most of the tools you would want to create and/or edit a doc. I find the revisions tab particularly useful as it allows you to revert to older versions of your doc.

Spreadsheets in Google Docs are fantastic. Plenty of features here, even for the most demanding users. Sure, it does all the things you would expect it to do, but, there is one feature it has that I think is killer: you can chat while you’re collaborating on a spreadsheet. This is the perfect place for chat functionality because explaining numbers in a spreadsheet and getting everyone on the same page can be cumbersome.

So there you have it - a couple more productivity tools to add to your list of web apps that can help you make the most out of Splashtop. With tools like this, getting on the web seconds after you hit the power button can be a lot more powerful than you might think. In this case it means seconds to edit a document, spreadsheet or presentation. Isn’t that the way it should be?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Future, features, partners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.