Before starting, I want to tell that this is a real story, and that my father’s company has benefitted from it.

Many years back, there used to be only paper work which people would post and it would take days to reach to the addressee. Then came Email, Microsoft Office and other things – people started to mail the official documents to save time, many times the documents needed editing from various people. Those people would download the document, edit it on their system, and send the copy back. The original writer would get back multiple copies of the same document and would have to combine each of them – the same thing is was going on in my father’s office. One day, when he was working on his laptop, I just approached him and saw that he was mailing some people from Outlook with some attached documents to be edited (I had got to know about Google Docs only the day before), so I suggested him about Google Docs and showed him a few videos – which were exactly based on the problem he was facing, the problem I have described above. He was amazed and started a bit of research on it and viewing some tutorial videos. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the amazing things we can do with Google Docs to make the most out of it.

Using @yourcompany.com Email Addresses

Almost every company has its own website and an emailing system set up – and as the company grows, having same email is necessary so that you do get each important email. Now, my father wanted to have the same email addresses for Google Docs too – and Google Docs allowed that. Well, it was actually because you could create a Google Account with any email address and use Google Docs from that after you’ve verified the ID.

Syncing with Microsoft Office

I know that developers/coders and some people don’t like to use Microsoft Windows, but almost every company gives their employees laptops loaded with Microsoft Windows & Office as they were only taught to operate that (in their childhood or training session) – I am not saying that they can’t use Mac or Linux, just that most of them still use Windows with Office. And as they use Office, they would obviously need some plugin or extension to integrate it with Google Docs – and here is where OffiSync comes to the rescue. It is a really useful plugin by which you can create new documents, upload existing ones, edit their properties or authors or change permissions. One of its main features also include real-time collaboration. You can view more of its features here or download it from here. Recently, Google had also acquired Docverse, but it never came back into action.

Attaching/Linking Documents from Outlook

Now that you have created a document, you need to upload it to Google Docs too – you could of course do that easily with OffiSync (which works with Word, PowerPoint & Excel), but Outlook is also not a bad idea as a lot of people use it for mailing. This can be easily achieved by the Harmony plugin made by Mainsoft. It embeds into Outlook’s sidebar (which you can open/close any time depending on how much space you need) – and you could do anything from it like uploading documents (by just dragging and dropping the documents into it), changing document’s author, searching for documents, sending them via mail etc. You can learn more about it here.

‘Real Features’ of Google Docs

We have discussed how you can get Google Docs integrated with Office, but we also need to know the main features of Google Docs! The main features include real-time collaboration, chatting with people who are editing the document when you are editing it, and many of the features you can find in Microsoft Office. These videos really tell a lot about Google Docs:

Final Thoughts

Google Docs really helps in having only a single copy of the document, it also stores versioned copies of the document so that we can revert back to any revision of the document at any time. One problem that people say is that Google Docs doesn’t preserve the formatting of the original document, but official documents do not contain so much of formatting – and I think that Google Docs would surely solve this problem in the near future. So it is just appropriate for companies, businesses, schools, or anything. My father hasn’t purchased Google Apps yet, currently he’s only testing it on the normal version of Google Docs and teaching his colleagues to use Google Docs and integrate it with Microsoft Office. I hope that this post would help them.

You can take the tour of Google Docs here or view the new features or visit the official Docs blog. By the way, Digital Inspiration also has some good tips and tricks for Google Docs.