Enhanced Collaboration: Online Document Processors

A document processor is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of printable material. Be it university students, employees, or employers, we use document processors such as Microsoft Office, Open Office, etc, in order to produce documents for our daily tasks. Without a document processor, we could not be able to present our work in a proper, tidy and formatted manner.  Imagine that you use NotePad to generate a document, it wouldn’t look as nice and attractive to the person who will go through the document.

Well, these are the issues we would be concerned about in the past, right now, we have to worry about something else, which are the accessibility to the document processors anytime, anywhere and anyhow. In this face paced and ever-growing world, speed is essential to keep up to the others. In the past, we will go back to our office, or home, login to our personal/work computers, open the document processor and get started with our work. Do you still think we have to work the old way?

The answer is a big NO. Google Docs provides you the convenience to access to your documents wherever you are, as your documents will be stored online, instead of being saved in your personal computer. That’s  the good thing about Google Docs. The best thing about Google Docs is that it enables you to collaborate with other people in real time, in which, changes are noticed immediately, with the previous versions of the documents retrievable. This saves you the time to attach the document to your email to be sent to the intended recipient. With the real time collaboration, it gets rid of document duplications, in which can be clearly illustrated in the video below;

There are various advantages in using Google Docs, but there are two main things I love about it;

Storage: I love that these docs are accessible from whatever machine I use. I log in via my phone, my home laptop, and my office box and I never have to worry about versioning. I manage one doc in one place.

Collaboration: With Google Docs, I invite my colleagues into a document that’s hosted by Google and updates in real time. We can edit each others’ articles and even chat in real time on the document itself. This is essential and particularly useful in a business environment, whereby co-workers can utilize this advantage to achieve better results.

Apart from Google Docs, I’ve also came across another online document processor by Zoho. It separated the functions into different categories; Zoho Writer as word processor, Zoho Sheet as spreadsheet processor, etc. Personally, I’m using Google Docs, and I haven’t tried Zoho yet. But I do see significant similarities between both of them. To sum up the post, I want to stress that traditional document processors will still have its significant market and usage, but I expect online document processors like Google Docs and Zoho to be the next big thing for years to come! Try it out yourself, I’m sure you will have no regrets!

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