Josh Young

Well, Google is at it again. A while back, they purchased Writely, which is an online document editor. I had been using it for a while and was quite fond of it. As I was editing some documents yesterday in Writely, I noticed that they were going to have a system outage that night. For what you might ask? Well, as of today, Writely is now known as Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

They have integrated Google Spreadsheets into the application (which I also use and love), so it’s easier to keep track of things in one place. Also, they have converted it to the “Google look and feel” so that it’s consistent with all of their other products, and they have changed/added some new features. It looks like the collaboration feature is going to behave slightly different, but not much (although I haven’t had a chance to dig into that yet).

At this point, it’s not something that has EVERY feature that you’d ever want, and it’s not going to permanently replace regular desktop editing with Microsoft Word, etc. YET, but it’s definitely another good step in the right direction. Collaboration was great in Writely, and it looks to be just as powerful in the Google verion. We’ve been using Writely to finish up the final wording for our church’s new website (after Rallypoint went and died on us), and it’s been working great. The only thing that we were missing (that Rallypoint had) was the ability to comment on documents, and wouldn’t you know it, Google Docs & Spreadsheets has that now.

Overall, it’s a great change, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, go do it now! It’s free, and all it requires is a free Google account (as do all of their other applications except search).

Let me know what you think of it.