Recommended GoogleDocs workarounds/tweaks

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webfork
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Recommended GoogleDocs workarounds/tweaks

#1 Post by webfork »

Background

A few months back I did a post about a pure Microsoft environment and some discussion about how to try and manage that. A lot of great stuff came out of that discussion and I was glad TPFC had ideas and suggestions. Amusingly, I now have an almost exclusively with NON-Microsoft products setup, in particular Google Docs (hereafter GDocs).

While I was intially excited about it, turns out this is very much a mixed bag. I'll share some of my findings so far -- feedback is welcome.

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What's wrong with GDocs?

Poor offline support

Regardless of Google Drive's installation, you can work offline with GDocs if and only if:
  1. You are using Chrome browser
  2. You have a plugin installed
  3. You're not unlucky and try to edit a file that wasn't cached by the Chrome browser plugin (the system for determining what's cached is at best opaque)
Workaround (not freeware) SyncDocs. This is trialware and it's not 100%, meaning the files that it downloads are not 1:1 compatible with Microsoft or LibreOffice (there are options to auto-convert to either program). Which leads to the next issue ...


Incompatibility

Once again, in the productivity area, you need to stay in one camp. Whether it's GDocs or Word or LibreOffice, there are rare cases of clear compatibility between camps. Some things work fine in one direction, but not in reverse. GDocs will open Word and LibreOffice files just fine, but it's ability to save to this same format is unsurprisingly hobbled and poor. Microsoft Word files can only be reliably be edited by the Microsoft program that created them and nothing else (not even Word Online). For our purposes (and this article) that means if you create something in GDocs, it's hard to leave.

Workaround: The best track I've found to moving from GDocs to other programs is to export to HTML format and then paste that into a document. It's a slower process (you have to unzip it first) but has few formatting issues.


Tracking changes

While the basic collaboration functions in GDocs are some of the best I've used, they get way out of hand when there are multiple reviewers making dozens of changes. Keeping track of them, navigating changes, and sorting are a joke. Comparing each document phase is impossible. I always thought Confluence's comparison tool was messy and over-complicated, but now I'm envious.

Workaround: I download every file as a separate ODT file and run a separate comparison in LibreOffice (screencap below). It's not great.

Below: LibreOffice document comparison.
Image


Immaturity

Despite having been available for 15 years now, Sheets is surprisingly behind the times. It's not far from the basic, collaborative spreadsheet program I tested out ~7 years ago. Even very basic Excel formulas fail in this program. You can't paste in more than a few dozen records at a time, which is painful.

Workaround:
  • Look into some of the support for Regular Expressions which its very mature and intelligent, and definitely out in front of Excel in many areas. I also like using this browser plugin which also has some great Regex replace functions.
  • For Excel-function compatibility, look to LibreOffice Calc.
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Re: Recommended GoogleDocs workarounds/tweaks

#2 Post by webfork »

A few updates here ...
  • I'm using Firefox with the Google Container add-on. This of course prevents Google overreach (if you login once, you're thereafter always logged in) that's a common problem with Chrome, but especially single-sign on. I often prefer to login to other services with a separate account, some that I don't want to associate with Google SSO.
  • I'm using the commercial SyncDocs rather than Google Drive. I made some inroads with FTP Rush but Syncdocs helped because it includes a batch converter from GDocs files to MS Office formats. There's also a LibreOffice converter but it only sort of works.
  • ShareX works as a great file uploader to GDocs and can copy the associated URL after upload.
  • I've been able to use Thunderbird to mostly avoid the ever-changing Gmail interface.
  • You can use Pidgin with an add-on instead of Google Chat. I unfortunately couldn't find any recently updated chat encryption add-ons to get around the Google surveillance, but there are dozens of better chat service options available for cheap or free.

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