Official Google Docs App – Review

Been waiting a while to get my hands on this app.  Waited all day at work to find ways to use it, but never quite got the opportunity.  But here I am at the end of the night so let’s give it my best.  I’ll do a bit of talking, but let you view the screenshots mostly.

Interface

Give it a look over, very simplistic feel.  There’s been that revolution that developers make the app look as simple as it should be, if not simpler, and save the magic for the features.  Docs provides the same feel as most of their other apps, if not a new colour scheme.  There’s the nice menu popups and very smooth looking.  It does still look like the mobile version when you’re in the document itself, so that doesn’t seem like much of an improvement over using the website.

Widget

There’s a snappy widget that allows you to quickly upload a document or photo.  Everybody always talks about Evernote, and I’m sure it’s a good app and all, but I never quite got it.  Docs is my reservoir of notes and tags.  It’s what worked for me, so this makes it so much easier.  A neat feature, which I’m not sure is in the mobile version at all is to upload a photo and turn on the OCR sauce on to turn it into some workable text.  Now if it would be able to take business cards and convert them to contacts… dream come true!

how it looks on the webapp – neat how it even was able to pick up on the fact it was rotated

Editing

This is where it really is a let down.  Some of my documents didn’t allow me the “EDIT” button.  I think that had to do with the file being an ‘older’ version. Otherwise most were editable (and viewable in the cases of PDFs).  Multitouch support is there pretty well throughout.  The biggest bummer of it all is that for the editing of the spreadsheets it’s still the old style mobile editing, where clicking on a cell will let you edit a ‘row’ of data.  Unfortunate as it doesn’t support the frozen columns/rows, and most often i’m working on attendance files where I work down a column.  So really time intensive.

Sync

It does allow for background syncing of the docs.  Not sure how ‘necessary’ this is as I’d probably rather do a refresh when I pull it up, and most often I’m putting files INTO storage, rather than pulling them up.  And when you pull them up it pulls the file from the cloud anyways at that time.  I’ll leave mine checked for a few days and see how it works.

Printing

Works with Cloud Print and looks as tho’ the app isn’t necessary on the phone as it does it through the cloud.  Excellent feature.  [I love sending things to the printer at the office when I’m not there.  However, there’s no such option when viewing a PDF, nor are there any options of choosing which pages, etc… it’s an all or nothing.

Sharing

Sharing allows you to upload a file / photo / etc… to your cloud and where possible convert it to the appropriate Doc file (see above about OCR).

What it’s missing

One thing I noticed that, especially in my list, it gets cluttered very easily, so there’s no smooth way to navigate ‘folders’ – but that’s an issue with the webapp as well.  I haven’t tried it without any internet, so I can’t verify it needs it (thus no offline support), but the way it pulls in the files make it seem as tho’ it would be required.  Maybe that’s what sync is for.  I’ll have to keep testing.

I’d also like to be able to edit the widget – I don’t really use the starred feature often in Docs, so having it on the widget it kind of a useless button.  The whole settings option is pretty … weak.  2 options to change – the cache size and to clear it.

Also, when a doc has a photo in it (not that I have many now, for me Docs is either a note taking app, or a survey form repository) you can’t edit it – even something simple like inline/fixed.  And my wishlist would be to edit forms.

Overall?

It’s just a start.  There’s plenty more on my wishlist, but that’s asking for a lot from a first release.  There’s a ‘send feedback’ button, but I’ll play with it a bit (hey, maybe Google reads these blogs… naah).  But, I like it.  It’s a fresh start, and something I thought would make the whole “google conversion” complete for me with Android.  I can’t wait to see what other options they’ll be cooking into it in future versions (like including discussions and versions and realtime editing with collaborators).

What do you think it was missing?  Share your thoughts below.