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Google Docs Vs. Microsoft Word: an Even Matchup?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Software developer Jeff Cogswell writes: 'About a year ago, I decided to migrate my documents to Google Docs and start using it for all my professional writing. I quickly hit some problems; frankly, Google Docs wasn't as good an option as I'd initially hoped. Now I use LibreOffice on my desktop, and it works well, but I had to go through long odysseys with Google Docs and Zoho Docs to reach this point. Is Microsoft Word actually better than Google Docs and Zoho Docs? For my work, the answer is "yes," but this doesn't make me particularly happy. In the following essay, I present my problems with Google Docs and Zoho Docs (as well as some possible solutions) from my perspective as both a professional writer and a software developer.'"
You can see a detailed revision history of a document, including every saved version ever, in Google Docs.
It can show you the differences from the current/previous versions.
So if you deleted text, just pull up the revision history, grab the text you want, and paste it back into the current version.
It's not any different from a "real" version control workflow.
it has features that fit any conceivable needs
Speak for yourself. I use Google Docs for lots of things, where Word simply does not fit. For ex:
1. Daily time-sheets of my team members with details of work done, and time spent, with status.
2. Project progress of my department; which plugs into the that of the entire division.
etc.
3. A taxi dispatch system uses Google docs to find out current location, availability, status etc using Google docs. Word is totally unusable in such scenarios.
Wait, what? Are you talking about the ability to do real-time collaborative editing of Word documents here?
Word (and Excel, and Onenote) has this already, and has for a few years now. It's part of the Skydrive integration. Documents are stored "in the cloud" but you get a local copy, too, for disconnected editing. Any machine (or phone, yes even iPhones and Androids) connected to Skydrive gets the synced up copies too). Version history (up to 25 versions anyway) are stored. Hell, even the OS X versions of Word and Excel support real-time collaborative editing. You don't even need Office installed.... the web app versions of Office 2013 are free.
In short -- Microsoft has real-time editing of an Excel document by someone using a native app on Windows, a native app on OS X, and someone using Chrome on a Linux system. Your uses cases are supported just fine.
This is the reason why it's difficult for other word processors to read and write Word, they just don't have the exact same COM object hierarchy in memory. So they can only support a subset of the full "format", but on the other hand they can often read a broken document much better than Word itself because they literally only extract the bits they need.
I agree - unacceptable.
However - try being in a situation where you are sending documents to an intermediary who translates the document into your client's language (and vice versa of course), and ending up with the document describing the 100 million euro project, CRASHING Word, as soon as the document crosses 100 pages.
Then imagine calling Microsoft's quite expensive business support, asking for help, and flat out being told, that this is a known issue for documents that traverse different language installations, and that there is no forthcoming fixes for this bug, and that the work around is to keep the documents below 100 pages.
At that point, it either becomes a beaurocratic nightmare to keep track of every piece of the 2,500+ page document, OR you simply instate a simple rule of always opening the document in Open Office, saving it in Word format again, and then opening it in Word, after which there were NO crashing issues with the large document. A few layout issues, but no one really cared about that.
Granted, that was about 10 years ago now, and I have no idea why the hell that work around turned out to work, but THAT is a horrible type of bug. It is a show stopper, and quite frankly much worse than a watermark corruption issue.
Now, do competing suites have issues? Yes, they do. But for some reason the relatively trivial issues that they have always trumps the game stopping bugs that probably still exist in MS Office, simply because "that's what everyone uses".
And this applies to all the dominant pieces of software. Doesn't matter what they are.
And in case you hadn't noticed, I seriously hate that attitude.