Google Docs

This is day two of using the Google Docs for the Blog initiative. I’ve had issues. Not going to lie

Bad

• Pasting in to Blogger
• Things reformat according to blogger’s styles and override some of the settings made by Google Docs.
• I have to use carriage returns (hit enter) twice after paragraphs to get a space. This is 1980’s old school. I cannot use the power of the tag to group things without just manually writing it in the document and copying it manually into the HTML editor on Blogger.
• My phone does not have the storage available for editing docs. Apparently there is some way to do this on my Android phone. I’ll keep looking.
• Can’t embed a YouTube or other video in to the document. This makes it difficult to paste into Blogger as well because you have to go back and forth between editing formats to get your post to look the way you need it. In Blogger for example you can simply display the YouTube or embedded video in the editor. Surely this functionality could be ported to Drive. Then again, there are a dozen things I would like ported the other way.
• I can’t figure out how to create new styles.

Good

• Editing docs across platforms and from multiple locations is awesome!
• Autosave rocks.
• The Android app says you can take a picture of a document, turn it to text and publish it online without a computer. I’ll believe it after trying it. Bad luck so far with OCR.
• Intuitive interface. I use VIM as a text editor and have forgotten how nice a Windows style editor is for non programming documents.
• This will make it easier for me to have the computer read the text of my blog to me before I post it. This might help quality, but I doubt it.

I may start using Google Docs for my work time tracking and such. I already use Google Docs for storing my copy of the work notes. I have little proprietary information in those notes. It is a document to help me do my job. It is good to have an offsite backup. I will not put files  on Google Docs from work. Those, I will still make separate folders for on local systems.

Between spreadsheets for things like what books I’ve downloaded to my eyeglass prescription, I use Google docs for all kinds of things. I will use Google Docs even more now. I used to use Google Docs for the blog, but gave it up in 2010. This means there is a pretty good gap in my list of entries. I have them in text format at the house. Perhaps I will add them to Google Docs via Google Drive. That is, tar them up and copy them in as a file. Actually, Google Docs has turned in to Google Drive so I must start calling it that.

Have I written more since using a word processor?