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My 3 cents: I trust my hard drive availability a lot more than I trust my internet availability. I don't trust Google to maintain Docs, or my Google account,

by avhon1 6y ago

My 3 cents: I trust my hard drive availability a lot more than I trust my internet availability. I don't trust Google to maintain Docs, or my Google account, for the rest of my life. I dislike when applications unexpectedly change. Cloud apps are both more likely to do this, and don't have the option of reverting to a previous version.

dheera 6y ago
The one biggest thing going for Google Docs IMO is that a document usually displays exactly the same way regardless of the OS and font DPI setup of the user, at least as long as they are using Chrome on their OS. Fonts are loaded from the cloud, so you never run into issues with those, and you can even pick some awesome fonts from Google Fonts and not have to worry about whether the destination system has them installed. There are very few, if any, system fonts that are common to Linux, Mac, and Windows, and most system fonts are typographically terrible. Usually documents created in Word and imported into OpenOffice inevitably have to push the last 1 line onto the next page and mangle all the alignments. Often because someone created the doc in Arial and it loads it as Ubuntu Sans for me and Helvetica for a Mac user or some such.
arp242 6y ago
It depends on your usage; I don't really like using this kind of software in general, but on the rare occasions I need to use it (usually to fill in some document for some organisation or government) I just use Google Docs. Almost all of these documents are fairly ephemeral so long-term storage isn't really an issue (actually, lack of it is a feature, since it often contains sensitive personal information). Google Docs works "good enough" for this and doesn't require installing a lot of software for a 10-minute task. For more serious usage, I'd probably look for a desktop solution, since that's just so much quicker (Google Docs is really slow), but for casual usage it's pretty good.

by avhon1 6y ago

dheera 6y ago

The one biggest thing going for Google Docs IMO is that a document usually displays exactly the same way regardless of the OS and font DPI setup of the user, at least as long as they are using Chrome on their OS. Fonts are loaded from the cloud, so you never run into issues with those, and you can even pick some awesome fonts from Google Fonts and not have to worry about whether the destination system has them installed. There are very few, if any, system fonts that are common to Linux, Mac, and Windows, and most system fonts are typographically terrible. Usually documents created in Word and imported into OpenOffice inevitably have to push the last 1 line onto the next page and mangle all the alignments. Often because someone created the doc in Arial and it loads it as Ubuntu Sans for me and Helvetica for a Mac user or some such.

arp242 6y ago

It depends on your usage; I don't really like using this kind of software in general, but on the rare occasions I need to use it (usually to fill in some document for some organisation or government) I just use Google Docs. Almost all of these documents are fairly ephemeral so long-term storage isn't really an issue (actually, lack of it is a feature, since it often contains sensitive personal information). Google Docs works "good enough" for this and doesn't require installing a lot of software for a 10-minute task. For more serious usage, I'd probably look for a desktop solution, since that's just so much quicker (Google Docs is really slow), but for casual usage it's pretty good.