Google Releasing an Office Suite

prostoalex writes "Google Apps for Your Domain is Google's entrance into the office productivity world, but contrary to popular expectations, the company is not shipping word processor or spreadsheet for corporate use just yet. Google, Inc. bundled e-mail client (Gmail), shared calendaring environment (Google Calendar), instant messaging client (GTalk) and HTML page generator (Google Page Creator) to be used across specific domains. The service will be ad-supported, reports the Associated Press." From that article: "The free edition of Apps for Your Domain is, like Google's main site, supported with ads. By the end of the year, the company also plans to launch a paid version that will offer more storage, some degree of support, and likely, no ads. A price for this edition hasn't been set. Providing e-mail and other applications for businesses moves Google closer into what has traditionally been turf occupied by Microsoft Corp. Earlier this year, Google released a program that builds simple Excel-type spreadsheets but lets users access them on the Web."

No spreadsheet or word processor: not office suite

[rickkas7]

If you look at Google's page for Apps for your Domain [google.com] there's no mention at all about the spreadsheet or word processor. This announcement is just gmail + calendar + IM + web page creator, which is nothing like an office suite at all.

Re:Google Spreadsheet

[lahvak]

As other people noted, this is also true with different versions of Word, actually the problem is even worse there. When I was in graduate school, I had a part time job working for a textbook publisher. We were supposed to use Word for everything, but we had a very strict short list of features we were allowed to use. I remember it said no automatic numbering, no numbered nor buleted lists, no page headers nor footers, etc. The reason was that the documents had to go to a number of people who had different versions of Word, and it had to work well for all of them. If we used some of the "prohibitted" features, some of the editors got complete garbage, not just small differences in linewrap and margins.

You see, theoretically, with a well designed document which uses things like paragraph styles etc correctly, it should not matter what the margins are, where the lines wrap, what is the line-spacing etc. For example changing the margins will change the line wrap, page breaks etc, it wil change the way the document looks, but it should still look perfectly fine, there should be absolutely no functionality lost. The problem with this is that I have never ever seen a well designed document created in Word. I have seen some close calls, but there was always some place where the author used line-breaks and tabs instead of properly formatted and indented paragraps, or something like that. It is just to damn hard to create a properly formatted document in Word, and to damn easy to take some quick shortcut, which works just fine until somebody opens the document in another (version of) wordprocessor, include the part of the document in another document, or change margins of font or something else.

Re:Google Calendar

[warith]

No kidding... is MS going to figure out how to, I dunno, INDEX the mail properly for fast searching?

When I can search thousands of GMail messages instantly, and then it takes Outlook a minute or two to search fucking TEXT on my LOCAL HARD DISK, you know there's a problem.