Google Documents for Business

In this post, we’ll review Google Documents for business as well as give tips to those who, while casual users, haven’t taken the leap into full-time use of this productivity suite. With all the rage surrounding online document sharing in cloud hosted environments, and before going further, I strongly encourage entrepreneurs and small business owners to save a copy of all business related assets to an external hard drive. This advice seems to ‘cut against the grain’ as it concerns the need for cloud hosted solutions but nothing is further from true! Although it is highly unlikely Google will cease offering their Internet based suite for multimedia and document sharing, other services are less stable and, truthfully, could go out of business at any time and without warning.

Case in point is a website located at ‘fileupyours.com’. This document storing and sharing website was operating long before Google Docs came into existence and I used it for pretty much all storage and collaboration needs of this company. One day, I went to the website and discovered, to my utter shock, they were no longer in business and there was no way to recover the hundreds of documents stored there. It was a good thing I kept an external drive with the same information or there is little chance my company would’ve recovered from such a devastating loss. Perhaps that is a bit of hyperbole but the expense and pain of reproducing all the information would’ve been overwhelming and outrageously expensive.

Nevertheless; with the cloud storage wars in full swing between Google Docs, Microsoft Onedrive, Dropbox and Box.com, never before has it been as crucial to choose the right solution for your online storage and project collaboration needs.

Here are supported file types which Google Docs allows free upload and sharing with;

1. Microsoft Powerpoint
2. Microsoft Word
3. Image files such as jpeg, png and gif
4. Video files such as mpeg, wmv, mov and avi
5. Microsoft Excel
6. Adobe PDF (portable document format)
7. Apple Pages
8. Text files (.txt)
9. XML (.xps)
10. Archive files (.zip and .rar)

If the file type you are working with isn’t listed, go to Google Docs and attempt to upload them, you may be surprised! Once files are uploaded, it is important to preview them, onsite, to make sure they can be viewed by yourself as well as others. Over the years, Docs has come a long way with keeping uploaded document formats intact. When it first launched, Google’s ability to keep formats intact (after upload) was a huge point of frustration with early adopters of this technology.

However, this no longer seems to be an issue so if your documents, spreadsheets and presentations are properly formatted chances are, they will remain just as you created. Google Docs also offers the ability to create documents within the interface. This feature, as of this writing anyway, is one we’d strongly discourage anyone from using. Whether using Microsoft Powerpoint, Word, Apple Pages or other software, editor ribbons are much more robust than that offered by Docs. As our online learners know, we are document creation fanatics and encourage them (and teach through online video tutorials) to use only robust editors and unfortunately, Docs just doesn’t measure up.

Here are business and personal uses for Google Documents;

1. Storing documents and multimedia assets
2. Sharing documents and multimedia assets
3. Creating and editing documents
4. Building collaborative environments for teams
5. Providing anytime, anywhere access
6. Internet publishing of content

Is your data safe while stored on Google Docs? The quick answer is probably but keep in mind Google’s business model is based on providing relative content to anyone who uses their search engine to locate it. If your documents or multimedia assets ‘fit the bill’, there’s a chance it will be indexed and viewable to the general public. However, document security is largely based on who you share information with and what they do with it after (and if) download. Most important to security is building a culture of trust between collaborators, using built in security features and only sharing with those whom it is absolutely necessary.

Google assures users unless they personally ‘publish’ a file to the web, search engines won’t be allowed to either ‘crawl’ or ‘index’ documents. Only time will tell if this is true or not. Google was caught, recently, in the NSA spying scandal and has provided emails and other private data to the United States Government so it isn’t a stretch to believe they’d provide business or personal documents to their own search engines (if not those of competitors).

Beyond the basic editor available within this productivity suite are tools known as ‘plugins’. A plugin is software which can be added to Google Docs in order to enhance its usability. For those familiar with Microsoft Powerpoint, there are plugins available for this presentation suite as well.

The future of Google Docs cloud hosting promises to be bright and as time moves forward - more features will be added. One of the more ambitious growth objectives for Google is to enable users to enjoy ‘offline’ access to documents and spreadsheets. Syncing in such a way is not only a major competitive advantage for those who offer it (such as Dropbox) but enhances usability to die hard users. Key to realizing this and as Google well understands, is allowing third party development of plugins and software and a commitment to be inclusive going forward. After all, the Internet is built on community development and unless I see information to the contrary, software development isn't excluded!


Brian D. Dale
Google SEO Instructor