I write original works and fan ficsand this app lets me work on them at any point. Just waking up and I have an ideajust hopping out of the showerin the line at the storelunch breakmoments of clarity while gardeningyou get the point. Since the first time I’ve used this appto the many years laterI have stopped worrying about forgetting some idea I had before I get to my computer. Even if my phone is offlineI have been able to work on my stories. I think it really is my most used app on my phone. Alsobecause it auto savesI HAVE NEVER HAD MY STORIES DISAPPEAR! Unlike other writing programsthat have lost me hours of work because of a blue screenfreezingor other issuesI have never had the pain of opening a Google Doc and finding all my work gone. I do wish it had a better way to organize your filesas what it does have seems “meh.” Butat leastit has some form of organization. LastlyI love that I can share the doc in various ways. This has been so helpful for me when I comes to sharing my stories. It lets those who are my beta reader comment and make suggestionsthose who I wrote for have full accessand those who I want to let just read all have their own set of restrictions.

I’ve been a longtime user of Google Docs—around three or four years—and it’s been great for storing important documents. I’ve also used it a lot for jotting down ideaswriting creative storiesand other personal uses. I feel that these are what the app is best for. I’ve tried to use it several times for academic essaysand the current format does not support certain basic functionsespecially with indentationadding page numbers in MLA or APAand so on. The spell check for Google Docs is also flawedand frequently marks everyday words as misspelledand then other words not in the regular dictionary as perfectly correct. The syncing is also kind of finicky sometimesand you can lose work or have to restart the app multiple times in one sittingif you’re somewhere that there is no ideal connection. So if you’re a student or a professionalyou are also going to want Microsoft Wordwhich has more features and is easier to use.Howeverthe syncing generally works very welland I love being able to back up all my documents. The aesthetic appearance of the documents are also very appealingand most of the basic writing functions are easy to access. Keyboard shortcuts still workand those shortcuts match to whichever model of computer you are usingso you don’t have to learn anything terribly new to use the app competently. It’s super easy to add other contributorsand to restrict privacy/use settings. All in all it has served me very ell.

I’ve been using Google Docs on my tablet ever since back when Textilus (now named Notes Writer + I believe) had a full makeover and became too hard to use. For further referencemy primary uses for Google Docs have been for various essaysidea jottingand poetrybut mostly writing long fictional works for fun. Google Docs works well for the first few categories. Howeverit is very disheartening when I’ve been working on a story for so long only for it to be nearly impossible to scroll through and work on it without serious lag and crashes. Works around/above 10,000 works tend to struggle the most. Typing words can take several momentswith it lagging a few seconds between each letter being typed. Using Search and Replace on things like names I decide to change quickly causes it to crash. Selecting (executed with double tapping on my tablet) and deleting can be finicky as well. Thisplus the lag that Google already gives me due to an overflowing storage (which I cannot seem to fix outside of its constant begging to get a subscription)makes writing not fun anymore. Google Docs is not a bad application. It is very good for what it is mostly meant for; business writingjoint writing (which worked well most of the time for when I used it)and short writing. I just miss being able to write lengthy storieswith the means to edit them in complex wayswithout consequence.

Google Docs is veryvery useful as a wholeproviding services that allow seamless collaboration and that solve many past horrors of word-processors (like the classic “I didn’t save my doc and now it’s gone foreverrrrr!!”). As great as it is on desktopI personally found the transfer to mobile devices a littlewellless great. It’s obviously difficult to find an intuitive way to lay out all the functions of Docs on desktop onto a smaller screenbut it’s honestly such a huge hassle navigating comments and suggestionseven when I’m on my iPad. It’s also kind of annoying that I can’t zoom out more on a doc—basicallyonce the width of the page fills the screenI can no longer zoom out. This doesn’t sound like a huge dealbut it makes for a lot of tedious scrolling when an already long document has relatively large text.Additionallythere are these small annoying glitches that occasionally occur. For examplewhen I was editing a docI kept trying to delete a spacebut it would always delete the space and the letter behind it. I tried over and over again to no avail... sigh....It also seems to me that Docs can get kind of slow? I’m on a new deviceso the hardware should be working finebut there’s a huge lag when I’m trying to type in the app.Other than these few problemseverything else has been working fine and going smoothly.