Google Docs & Spreadsheet

Travis Qian the next-roomy guy finds fun and functionality out of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which enables real-time online management for his teen digest magazine project. He creates a spreadsheet with detailed assignment breakdown and shares it with all members, who constantly report their progress by editing the same sheet. Each member invites others to view his/her articles, created with Docs.

Just like many other Google Apps, Docs & Spreadsheet was launched as, and still is, a beta. Yet unlike many other Google betas, D&S still has extra miles to go before it convinces people out of their traditionally must-have desktop word and spreadsheet processors, into this Web 2.0-empowered sandbox of collaboration.

In fact, the Oct. 10 marriage between Google's Spreadsheet and the former Writely has been proved powerful and productive for simple tasks, especially when co-op is required.

You don't have to start everything from scratch, D&S supports importing HTML files, plain text (.txt), Microsoft Word (.doc), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt), StarOffice (.sxw), Comma Separated Values (.csv), Microsoft Excel files (.xls) , and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods).

Some analyst suggests that "such offerings are more complementary than competitive with traditional desktop applications," which I agree, or at least from the perspective of translation-related projects, which sometimes require a lot more than copying, pasting and simple box-creating.

-_- an outdated, unfinished report found in my draft...