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As technology becomes more advanced, more and more people are choosing to work whilst on the move. This includes the creation and editing of documents anytime, anywhere. One of the good things for this kind of user is that the software needed to do this is available for free such as Google Docs and Microsoft’s Office Web Apps.

 

But which one is better to use? Well we’ll compare both on various points and see which ends up the victor.

 

1. Free Online Storage Space.

 

If you are looking for lots of online storage space then you need to use the Office Web Apps. Sharing storage with SkyDrive, it offers a huge 25GB of free online storage for your documents. These documents can be set to private so that just you or you and your friends can access them or you can share them publicly which gives anybody access to them.

 

Google Docs offers only 1GB of free storage which, although is alot, pales in comparison with the Office Apps.

 

2. Live editing.

 

Sometimes it is best to have many eyes to be able to look at a document and edit it together, especially if one of the people is elsewhere. Google Docs allows you to do this, as well as allowing the editors to talk between each other in the group chat as they edit the document.

 

Office Apps also allows multiple people to edit the document, but only allows them to do it one at a time. If somebody tried to access the document whilst it was being edited by somebody else then they would get a message saying that the document cannot be opened.

 

3. Supported File Types.

 

In Office Apps, you can only open, save or edit documents created in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote.

 

Google Docs gives you all of these and more which make Google Docs a clear winner for the modern day user.

 

4. Features.

 

Google Docs has many features in its Word Processor which make it extremely useful such as the spell-check as you type, ability to insert tables into your text and add footnotes.

 

The ability to reinstate a past version of the document if you have found that something has changed which you don’t want is also a useful function which can be done using the Revision History.

 

The Spreadsheet in Google Docs seems to be even better, offering lots of features and options which you would find useful when creating a spreadsheet.

 

With Office Apps, Microsoft seems to have put Word on a strict diet and have unfortunately left out some of the features which people enjoy such as footnotes, line-spacing and much more, leaving just the bare basics to play with

 

They seem to have also fed Excel with the same diet, having Functions (such as Formulas) axed from Office Apps as well as other functions like graphs.

 

Whilst Office clearly has the space advantage, Google Docs users get more features to choose from and this ultimately hands the crown of Web Document Editing to Google Docs… at least for now.

 

Want to learn more about the diet-free Office? Then come on one of our Office Training Courses!