Slightly Remarkable

Features

Since I don’t want to waste anyone’s time, I’ll just go over some of the things that I thought made this software so incredibly powerful and useful.

• A great user-interface. Everything is concise and you don’t have to look up “Help” to know how to do anything — instructions are straightforward and leave no question as to what to put in any form fields or what a particular button, tab, or link does.
• Online-collaboration. This is by far the best feature available. You can invite other Google Docs & Spreadsheets users to edit your document and make revisions. You can go back and restore revisions that were made in the past, or compare revisions in the past, or make a new revision. When you are editing or revising the document, if others are also editing at the same time as you, Google will let you know who is editing and automatically update the document as they edit it. You can visually see changes take place!
• Auto-save. While Google Docs & Spreadsheets does have a very visible “Save” button (as well as “Save & close” and “Discard changes”), it also automatically saves the document as you modify it. So if your browser crashes, you probably won’t have very much (if any) data lost.
• Worldwide viewing. You can allow anyone to view your document by publishing it to the Web, or you can invite folks to have a look at it.
• Spell-check. An essential part of any document editor, the spell-check is immediately available in the edit screen. It highlights misspelled words quickly — there is no lag — and doesn’t freak out and underline misspelled words automatically like Microsoft Word does, and then tell you that you don’t know how to spell “blog.”
• Blog integration. I am currently posting this blog entry through the Google Docs & Spreadsheets interface. I logged into it, created a new document, began writing, and published it to my blog. All you have to do is click the Publish tab, select the “change your blog settings” link and modify settings (everything is self-explanatory, and they even provide a list of supported blog systems), and then click “Post to blog.” It’s as simple as that!
• Fairly clean HTML output. I had to modify the HTML output of the document, but it is mostly standards-compliant (it is, at least to my knowledge, valid XHTML). It put line-breaks rather than paragraphs in the HTML, and there is no option for SGML- rather than XML-based HTML, but there may be a setting for that somewhere that I’ve yet to find. It also converts ampersands to & automatically, which is convenient, and the best part of all is that it doesn’t change the HTML back to what it was before I modified it when I go back into the regular edit mode (like Yahoo! Mail used to).

Anyway, as you can see this is a very useful and powerful piece of software that belongs at the top of your list of productivity options. It’s a lightning-fast, extremely powerful tool for anyone (not just us web geeks). Be sure to check it out!