Gosh, I use Google Docs a lot these days. I’m sharing several spreadsheets with medical students and library school interns that are working on a metadata project with me, I recently worked on an outline of a presentation with a colleague, and I just yesterday added a slide to a student’s presentation file.
Google Docs totally fits my writing style. Here’s how writing an article usually goes for me (spoiler alert!): I’ll start an article by coming up with a title and some sort of bulleted outline, and then I’m usually spent for the day. It takes brain power to conceive an article! But then the next day I’ll add a paragraph, or add to the outline, or put in a quote I know I want to use somewhere in the article. Then maybe later that night, when I’m at home, I’ll pop open the document to see what I’ve got written and think about what area I want to attack next. Definitely an iterative process, and with Google Docs I don’t have to worry if I saved the latest draft to my thumb drive, or if I’ve remembered to email myself the document before I left work.
I know that Docs doesn’t do everything, and I’ll leave my final formatting to a word processing software program so that I can insert my RefWorks citations neatly, but for most of the writing I do Google Docs is where it’s at. Also, just this week I discovered that one can insert ‘gadgets‘ into spreadsheets, which look very nice.
