Tip: Simplfy collaborative writing with Google Docs
Google Docs to the rescue!
The video below explains how it works. With Google Docs, your document, spreadsheet or presentation lives online. You invite people to access it (with different levels from read-only to full editing abilities). They make changes (which you can see). They make comments. They see what other people have revised and said. There is only ever one version of the letter. You can even get an RSS feed of the changes people are making.
I’m going to start using this with clients. I’ll need to convince them to get Google accounts but I don’t think that will be difficult. Proposals, letters, reports… It’s going to make life easier any time collaboration is required.
There are some limitations to be aware of, particularly when it comes to formatting. Google Docs doesn’t have the sophisticated formatting abilities of Word and doesn’t have a “Page Layout” view option (where you can see how the document looks on the page). To make the final document pretty you will need to bring back into Word. That’s a pain, but the real value of Google Docs is in the collaboration and sharing possibilities.
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