Some more features of Google Documents

In the wake of my recent, seemingly much more epic article about Google Documents, I've got a bit of an overview of a few other cool things I've seen in Docs recently.

One of the things that stood out most to me when I logged in to look at one of my Gotschland documents a few days ago was the new "Fixed width page view." It doesn't really change the workflow of Google Documents at all, but it does take Docs that much closer to being a very worthwhile word processor. Formerly I'd thought Docs to be a great tool for writing and having data available online, or for backup, but I hadn't thought of it as being a tool for preparing a document for printed output. With page view, Docs comes that much closer to being a word processor that's capable of replacing traditional desktop software for everything.

Another really cool thing I have noticed is that it's got a word-count mechanism. It doesn't update automatically like the wordcount on the status bar of Word 2007, but it does exist, making it helpful for NaNoWriMo. Another cool thing about Google Docs as a word processor for something like NaNoWriMo is that it exists everywhere, but we already knew that.

I've also recently discovered the new Find & Replace feature, which for the time being is really just a "replace all" feature. It's still quite handy. For example, I had an old document I'd pasted in from AppleWorks 5 on my old Windows XP machine. In this document, I used a lot of quote marks and apostrophes, and somehow they all transferred over as "Ò" and other similar characters. Luckily, I was able to use the replace all feature to put the proper characters in. It's just unfortunate that I didn't win NaNoWriMo 2006.

So, that was just a few more little things about Google Docs. It's got growing to do yet, hopefully it'll continue improving in the next year or so.