Posts Tagged: online storage

google drive

On 26 April 2012 by matthew With 1 Comments - google, technology

Google recently released Google Drive, the company’s ver­sion of a cloud stor­age ser­vice, sim­i­lar to Drop­box, Sky­Drive, Sug­ar­Sync, and others.

In essence, Google Drive is an exten­sion, or upgrade, of Google Docs. Here’s a short video from Google that explains what Google Drive is all about.

I’ve been using Google Docs for sev­eral years as my pri­mary suite of tools for cre­at­ing doc­u­ments, spread­sheets, as well as a stor­age cen­ter for doc­u­ments I receive from oth­ers. I also like the col­lab­o­ra­tive tools built into Google Docs, includ­ing the abil­ity to work on projects in a Google+ Hang­out. My wife uses Google Apps for her busi­ness. After get­ting accli­mated to some of the dif­fer­ences, and short­com­ings, of Google Docs, she and her team have been rolling for a cou­ple of years with­out a hic­cup. That is not to say that Google ser­vices, like Google Docs–>Drive, are for every­one. You really should con­sider your needs. If you fre­quently work with oth­ers using Microsoft Word, Google Docs may pose a for­mat­ting prob­lem, because you’ll need to con­vert Word doc­u­ments to Google Docs in order to edit them. The real issue, there, is the poten­tial for los­ing the for­mat­ting of a doc­u­ment. Google Docs does a decent job of con­vey for­mat­ting, but stel­lar. The same applies for Excel and Pow­er­Point files. For­tu­nately, you can export doc­u­ments in Word, Excel, Pow­er­Point, PDF, and other for­mats. I think this is really more of an issue for busi­ness users, but per­sonal users could also be affected. For more on this issue, see the arti­cle by Tony Bradley.
 
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