14 DAY TRIAL // Google Docs is the company’s main weapon on the enterprise market, besides Gmail of course, and the office and collaboration suite has been seeing a steady stream of updates and improvements aimed at making the cloud more of an alternative. Google’s regular modus operandi is to iterate fast, always bringing in small updates to improve a service or app. But, every once in a while, a reboot is needed and Google Docs is getting just such a reboot. The underlying cloud technology has been completely rewritten and the apps themselves are getting a major overhaul.
“They say a house is only as good as its foundation, and we believe the same holds true for web applications like Google Docs. With our old foundation, we could continue delivering most features you wanted quickly, but over time it became clear that some just weren’t possible. So we decided to rebuild the underlying infrastructure of Docs to give us greater flexibility, improved performance and a better platform for developing new features quickly,” Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager at Google, explained.
“Today, we’re pleased to announce preview versions of the new Google document and spreadsheet editors and a new standalone drawings editor, all built with an even greater focus on speed and collaboration,” he added.
The Google Docs document editor has seen some pretty big changes. It adds real-time editing to the mix and better collaboration with an improved comment system. Document formatting has also gotten better with a new import/export tool and revamped image positioning. You can read a more thorough overview of the new features in the new document editor here.
The second pillar of any office suite, the spreadsheet editor, has also gotten a new version in Google Docs. It comes with a bunch of new stuff, but Google says the biggest improvement is the speed. Thanks to a lot of work focusing on improving performance, the speed gain should be noticeable. Even the largest spreadsheets don’t slow it down and the editor remains responsive under the heavy load. The new editor also has a formula bar to edit cell content, drag and drop columns and other features.
Google Docs is also getting a new player in the team, a collaborative drawing editor. The new tool allows users to work together to create flow charts, diagrams and any other graphics they may need. The drawing can then be imported into other Docs documents or shared with the world as it is.
With the revamped underlying technology, Google is also moving to HTML5 for the more advanced features. The new editors were written with the upcoming web standard in mind, but, unfortunately, this means that they aren’t compatible with technologies like Gears. Practically, it means that users won’t be able to go into offline mode with the new editors for now.
In fact, all support for the offline feature will be dropped on May 3rd. The functionality will be brought back at a later date using HTML5, but a clear time line has been made available. To check out the new documents and spreadsheet editors, select the “New version of Google documents“ option in the Editing tab under Google Docs settings.
