Google Wish List....
When I'm using a computer, I pretty much live in the Google ecosystem. I think GMail is about the best implementation of an e-mail system that I have used. Google Docs has more than enough functionality to serve as my "office suite" most of the time. And over the last several years of so, I find myself working more and more on multiple computers, at multiple locations on multiple networks. So Google's tools provide ubiquity not only for my data, but also for the applications I need to work with that data.
But - and there's always a "but" - Google's tools aren't perfect. And I'm not talking about the necessity of having a net connection to access your data or apps, but things that get in the way of being productive, missing features that require you to duplicate efforts, things that actually impact the security of your data by forcing you to download it to what may be computer you have no control over and some features that could take Google's applications to a step above what is out there.
Here are some of the changes, improvements and old features I wish they would bring back.
GMail
GMail is the hub of my electronic communications. I have multiple personal and business e-mail accounts and they are all routed through my GMail account. GMail lets you send out messages using multiple "identities" and "reply-to" addresses. Incoming mail from multiple accounts is easily filtered, labeled and archived. And like any other e-mail application you can e-mail attached files located on your local computer.
The rub comes when you want to send someone a file you have stored in your Google Docs account. You cannot send that file out as an attachment to a mail message you create and edit in GMail. You can send a file as an attachment from within Google Docs using the sharing feature. However, you lose many of the features of the GMail editor. You can't access the HTML editor, you can't use custom signatures and most importantly for me, you cannot specify the From: address that should appear in the e-mail header. So if I am sending a file to a business client, they are expecting a message from my business e-mail address but instead they get a message from my default GMail account. Confusing to the recipient to say the least, the message may get lost depending on the filtering and spam setup the other person has set up.
Another limitation is that you cannot send multiple files as attachments from Google Docs. You have to send each file individually in its own e-mail message.
The only way to get around this is to download the file (or files) to the local computer and then upload it as an attachment in GMail. That's fine if its your computer, but if you're using a computer at your employer or at a friend's house or at an internet cafe, you can leave traces of your activity and files that you may not want to. Even downloading to a USB flash drive can leave footprints in the "recent documents" listing on the local computer. So come on Google, let us attach files in GMail directly from Google Docs.
Contacts (Address Book)
Google is big on letting you share your data between other Google users, whether it be Google Docs or pictures in PicasaWeb. I'd like to see sharing extended to the Contacts application as well. Here are several use cases:
- You have several GMail accounts for personal mail, work mail, and so on. Rather than having to maintain separate address books for each account, maintain one central address book and share that with your other accounts.
- You are working on a project with other Google users and you all will be contacting many of the same people. Instead of each person having to maintain separate address books, enter the contacts into one address book, include them in a group and then share the group or individual contacts with the other users. Then if one user finds out there is a change in phone number or e-mail address, the change can be made once and everyone has the updated information instead of circulating it via e-mail. Users in the group could also include notes on conversations with the contact in the notes field of the entry and those notes would be available to everyone in the group. I think some of these features are already available in Google Apps for Domains accounts, but it should be made available for all Google users and work across all Google accounts.
- Google Voice works with your contact list for managing greetings, messages and dialing. However, for a long time, Google Voice was only available to "Standard" Google users. I got my Google Voice number using a standard Google account. I later moved my stuff to a Google Apps account with my domain name. But.... there was no way to move my Google Voice number to the new account. I had to maintain both accounts and both address books for my Google Voice number and my Google Apps e-mail account. It would have been nice if I could have just shared the contact list on one account with the other.
Google Docs
Google Docs is Google's online file management and office suite application. You can upload just about any kind of file to Google Docs, making it a great place to backup critical files offsite and having them available anywhere. You can also share those files with others, either by giving them access to the file in your Google Docs (if they're a Google user) or by sending them the file as an attachment. If you are sending the file as an attachment, you have the option of sending it in a variety of office compatible formats - MS Office, Open Office, RTF, CSV, etc. Or as a PDF.
What I would like to see is the ability to save or "print" a file in Google Docs to any of these formats. I would really like to be able to have a file I create in Google Docs be available as a PDF. One use case that I have not found a way to deal with in Google Docs:
I use a spreadsheet to create invoices to my clients. Currently I use MS Excel and then print the final invoice spreadsheet to a PDF file which I then e-mail to the client. One thing I need to be able to do is to print the spreadsheet without showing the grid lines. I can do that from within Google Docs by choosing Print and then selecting "No Gridlines" from the resulting dialog box. I then have a document on screen that I can print locally or to a local PDF file. But I still have the problem of having the resulting PDF file on the local PC instead of having it go directly to "the cloud". And then I need to be able to e-mail it as an attachment and we're back to the first item of this wish list. If I try and share the spreadsheet as a PDF from Google Docs, I cannot do so without having the gridlines show up in the document. FAIL!
There are a couple of features that used to be in Google Docs that I wish Google would bring back. One is the ability to link to other files in Google Docs from within a Google Docs document. This goes beyond simple web links. This would let you create a link to a document that only exists in your Google Docs without it being published to the web. A use case would be where you have created a summary document that refers to a number of other more detailed documents that you have saved in Google Docs. Clicking on the link in the summary document would open up the referenced document. All of the documents remain within your Google Docs and are not out on the web for anyone to see if they have the appropriate URL. This feature was available previously for word processing documents created in Google Docs, but has since been removed.
I would like to see this linking feature available in Google Docs spreadsheets as well. The use case that comes to mind is one where I track projects in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet tracking would reference various documents such as proposals, specifications, invoices and other billings. These referenced documents might be in a variety of formats including spreadsheets, word processing documents, PDF and JPEG images, all of which would be stored in Google Docs. It would also be nice to be able to link to external web pages as well.
One more feature I would like to see brought back goes all the way back to the web app Writely that Google bought out as a foundation for Google Docs. This feature is one where you can e-mail an attachment to your Google Docs account and the attachment shows up in Google Docs. A use case might be that you have created a .doc file on your smart phone and want to finish editing it in Google Docs. You could e-mail that file in to Google Docs. Same thing with pictures and other file types. A work around is to e-mail the file to your GMail and then open the file and save it as a Google Docs document. Sorry, that's a bit of a kludge for something that has been available before.
If anyone at Google is listening, I hope this provides some food for thought on how to improve an already important part of my digital life. Maybe some Googler could take on some of these as part of their "20 percent time". Surely they would be useful to those folks using the Chrome OS.
No comments:
Post a Comment