1) Formatting Can Be Frustrating. If you’re design-minded – or just eager to keep your Word documents looking a particular way – Docs’ formatting glitches can occasionally be annoying. Docs can import Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, but so far, still doesn’t do well enough at preserving complex formatting. The original document’s words, numbers and information are all imported, but sometimes the tabs, spacing and other formatting isn’t fully maintained from the original Word doc. Google Docs has been improving its formatting capabilities, though, (Docx documents can now be imported) and has added new features. You can now add images, tables, and drawings to spruce up your documents. Formatting options are less robust but easier to use than those offered by Microsoft Word. And Google Docs now has a template library which lets you use pre-made document styles created by other users.

2) Passwords Aren’t Perfect. If someone intent on getting into your documents gains access to your Google password, they could view and potentially alter your documents, much as they could view or misuse your e-mail account. The same holds true for your computer, of course, but with online documents, the damage can be done knowing only your user name and password, whereas hacking into your computer – or stealing it – might entail more effort. Google offers tips on picking one carefully. Additionally, for those who have experienced the frustration of a forgotten user name or password, you could find yourself locked out of your documents if you forget those key details.

3) Storage Limits. You can store up to 5,000 documents and up to 1,000 spreadsheets. (Click here for Google’s detailed explanation on file size limits). That’s plenty of space for most of us, and just as GMail storage has kept growing, it’s possible Google will eventually boost the free space it offers for Docs. If you bump up against the limit, you can always open a new account. And as noted above, you can now purchase more space for Docs – $5 a year gets you 20GB, enough for hundreds of videos and many thousands of documents. Individual documents have size caps, though the limits are large enough that they rarely create a problem.

Alternatives to Google Docs?

• If you want to check out other free online Word processing options, start with Zoho Writer.
• If you like minimalism, try DarkCopy.com.
• If you just can’t leave Microsoft Word behind, try Microsoft’s Officelive.com.
• Mac writers can try Ommwriter for a Zen approach to words.

Google backs up your documents on multiple servers, and you can back-up your own docs in at least 4 different ways. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Please add comments below if you have thoughts on these methods, or have an alternative method to suggest.

1) Download the documents to your hard drive as Word or PDF files, or even as plain text. Once downloaded, the files can also be saved to an external drive or burned onto a CD or DVD.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

2) If you use your e-mail account as your backup bin or your filing cabinet, the Docs menu has a big “Share” button that lets you easily e-mail any document to yourself as an attachment or as text in a message.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

3) For old school paper fans, you can print out documents and keep them in a back-up binder.

4) Use software like GDocBackup, Gladinet.com, Cloud Hero or Cloudberrydrive.com – (all Windows only). Caveat: I haven’t tested those, or seen an easy-to-use Mac software tool yet. If anyone has experience with these backups, feel free to add your comments below. You can also backup to Zoho Docs.

In addition to enabling you to backup your documents using any of the methods above, Docs itself can serve as a backup tool for your other documents, even if you plan to continue using Microsoft Word or other software for your writing.

How Docs Can Be a Backup

It’s a good idea to back up documents periodically using whatever method you prefer. But one thing to consider is that storing files online may actually be safer in some ways than storing files only on your computer. Your Google Docs are secure regardless of what happens to one particular computer or device. If you lose or forget your computer, or you get hit with a virus or your hard drive crashes, chances are your old-school Word Documents will be lost or inaccessible when you need them. (Remember the time your computer crashed before you had saved an important document?) Furthermore, if you ever suffer through a flood, fire or other natural disaster that ruins even your backup drives, your cloud copies will remain safe.

How to Backup Word Docs Using Google Docs

Step 1: To use Docs to backup your existing word files, just log in to Docs, click the “Upload” button on the top left-hand side of the Docs menu. That will take you to a menu where you can browse your computer or external hard-drive for any files you want to upload for backup purposes or to edit online.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Step 2: Within the Upload menu pictured below, click on “Browse” to find your file, which will then be uploaded to Google Docs. The types of documents Docs will accept are listed below right on the menu (Docs works with all flavors of Microsoft Word documents).

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

A short-cut method is to use the personalized e-mail address listed on the “upload” page, which enables you to send docs to your Google Docs account as e-mail attachments. That way you can upload several documents at once, speeding up your backup process. On your uploads page you’ll see a special e-mail address to use – unique to you – that may end in @prod.writely.com. Here’s more detail on how it works.

Here’s a 1-minute video about a Google Docs user’s experience sharing and backing up documents.

Docs Constantly Backs Up Your Work

I haven’t yet had to draw upon a Docs backup. Even if you accidentally erase a key paragraph in Docs and then close your browser, all you have to do is go back to the Docs “Tools” menu and select the “Revision History” button. Docs constantly saves whatever you are working on, creating new revision copies minute-by-minute. You can even compare different revision sets to make sure you know what version you’re reverting to.

If your computer freezes, your browser crashes, or your work is otherwise interrupted, when you open up the Doc again, your document somehow pops back up, fully up-to-date. And you can always go later to whatever version of the document you want to revert to, like the one before you deleted a key quote.

If you have other thoughts on backing up, or tools/suggestions to add, please include them in the comments below.

1) In an era when someone can steal 130 million credit card numbers, it makes sense to be diligent about protecting your reporting materials. But being diligent doesn’t necessarily mean giving up on some of the most useful digital tools journalists now have access to, like Web-based software. It just means understanding a little bit about how new digital tools work and how to use them securely.

There are basically three levels of sharing with Google Docs:

A) LOCKED: Each document you create can be kept completely to yourself, requiring you to log-in with your private username and password.

B) PRIVATELY-SHARED: You can share a document with one other person or a group of people, by e-mailing it to them as an attachment, or by opening access to the Web-based document. The “Share” tab makes this very easy.

C) PUBLIC: You can publish a document so that anyone online can see it (assuming they have the link). With each level of sharing you can let people view and edit, or just view.

Click on the image below for a larger screenshot of the ‘Share’ Tab and the rest of the Google Docs editing menu:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

No one can access your web-based documents unless you specifically decide to share them with a particular person or group. Your Docs are locked up with a password just like your voice-mail, your home alarm system and your e-mail. A good place to read about how Docs lets you choose who can or cannot see your documents is in the official Google Docs documentation. It helps explain how Google keeps private documents separate from those that you or I choose to publish or share with colleagues.

For more information on how secure Docs are, and various testimonials, there’s a helpful, brief discussion, including comments from a Google representative, Neil Fraser, on GetSatisfaction.com, in response to the question: Is it safe to upload private documents on Google Docs? In short, the company draws sharp, digitally secure walls between the private notes you’re drafting for a story in progress, and the docs that you have published or shared. Because the digital robots and search-engine spiders that crawl the Web can’t get to your documents, spreadsheets or presentations, your docs won’t appear in any search index.

2) It’s in Google’s interest to be vigilant in ensuring that document security is guarded carefully. If private documents were to leak out onto the public Web, not only would Google’s reputation suffer, but so would the future viability of the company’s growing Apps business, which is predicated on getting companies to pay Google to store vital company documents. I recently wrote about the growing number of colleges and universities that are relying on Google to provide e-mail and document services for their students, and in many cases, faculty and staff. IT representatives – many of whom were initially skeptical about the idea of storing student information and documents on Google’s servers – have grown to trust the company’s servers and the security of Google Docs over the past two years. The corporate world is starting to buy in too. Motorola and Genentech are among the companies that have decided Google Docs’ security and privacy features are reliable.

This isn’t to say that Docs is perfect. The company admitted a security blunder back in 2007, when the software was still new. And security consultant Ade Barkah expressed concerns in March ’09 about certain Docs features, to which Google has responded. These are good reminders that no software system is perfect, nor is anything online 100% secure. The field of Web-based software is still relatively young. But the fact that thousands of institutions and a growing number of major companies rely on Docs’ security is indicative of the software’s underlying stability and security for the vast majority of its users.

3) Unless we forgo email, voice-mail and other crucial tools of contemporary communication, it’s unlikely that our information gathering will ever be as locked off from the wider world as our paper documents once were. The key thing is take appropriate precautions by selecting a password carefully and protecting it judiciously. Here are two additional tips from Neil Fraser’s post mentioned above.

“When using an unencrypted wireless connection or some other network you don’t really trust, use https://docs.google.com instead of http://docs.google.com. The extra ‘s’ means ‘secure’; all traffic is encrypted. The only down-side is it’s a little bit slower. 2) When you use someone else’s computer (especially at an Internet cafe or at a hotel), don’t forget to logout of your Google account. And when logging in, don’t check “remember my password.”

Incidentally, Google employees use the software themselves, for what that’s worth. Here’s what Fraser writes:

“Here at Google we use Docs to store all our confidential documents, spreadsheets and presentations. We use the same servers and we have no worries about people being able to see our data.”

If you are skeptical about Google in particular, there are other other good Web-based software options for journalists, including Zoho Docs. Another sleekly-designed, simple tool for creating individual documents is Writeboard from 37 Signals. And if you’re a fan of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Microsoft has said it will launch a Web-based version of its own software in 2010.

1) Create an Online Notebook
Go to Docs.google.com and open a new Google Doc the next time you’re ready to take down some notes. There are times when pouring out thoughts or drawing ideas on paper is great, but for ordinary note-taking, digital writing has distinct advantages. It may feel odd at first to be opening a new browser window rather than launching Word or scrawling on a notepad. But when your notes and article drafts are online in Google Docs, your observations, transcripts and interview records are all magically searchable.

Here’s how that comes in handy. Let’s say you’re on the road away from your desk computer and need to look up a bit of information you got from someone you interviewed three months ago. Just open up docs on your phone browser, or any computer browser, and type in the person’s last name, or the place where you talked (or any other word you associate with that interview) in the Docs search box. It’s just as speedy as the Google.com box: up pops everything else in the note you’re looking for. Or if you prefer, find a note by sorting your docs by date, title, or folder. Trying to recall a quote from an interview last year where someone said something about Winston Churchill? Search for Churchill and up pops the key quote you want.

I use digital note-taking for phone interviews and for jotting notes at events, conferences, lectures and meetings. It saves a lot of time and frustration later on. It’s certainly a lot quicker to find a digital note than to flip through hundreds of pages of paper, trying to make out one’s own hurried handwriting, page after page. Just as Google’s Web search revolutionized the way journalists gather background information online, so should Google Docs – and other similar Web-based tools – shake up the way we create, manage and organize our reporting materials.

2) Organize Your Web Research

Collect links/data/info into a doc that you – or anyone else you want to invite – can update at any time. You can use this for a team reporting project, or for cutting and pasting research data you’re gathering into a centralized digital repository. Because Docs is Web-based, you can click the links later on to get back to the relevant sites, and you can link bits of text in one document to any other document you’ve created. For instance, I was recently preparing to interview someone I had spoken to once before, so I linked back to that earlier document in my prep notes.

3) Organize and Annotate Story Ideas
Maintain idea lists for story seeds. If you’re detail-oriented, use spreadsheet columns for research links, potential interview subjects, and relevant facts or stats. Or just write down a list of something in a plain vanilla document. Click here for an example of a simple list I started using Docs. To create it, I just started a Doc, typed in something, hit the “Share” button and made it publicly editable. Feel free to play around with this doc, and add something to get used to how easy it is to use.

Below is a similar sample list, using a Spreadsheet. The format was drawn, by the way, from Google’s growing repository of templates, which are free for anyone to use as a way of jump-starting a particular document.Click here to try editing this to see how it works. When you edit or add to the spreadsheet, your changes will be updated below:

4) Remotely Access and Edit Reporting Notes

Type up interviews or refine your draft from an airport computer kiosk, an Internet cafe, a home computer or wherever you are when you get a surprise call. I started this blog post on one computer, read it over on my iPhone, then finished it up on another computer. I never worried about which computer was where, or what browser or operating system I was using.

If you need some more help getting started, here’s a free e-book about Google Docs on Scribd.

Next Post: Security – How Safe is Google Docs?

Previous Post – Google Docs for Journalists: An Introduction

In a series of posts, I’ll offer some tips on how journalists can make the most of Google Docs.

This first post is an introduction.

What is it?

Google Docs is a suite of free, browser-based software that includes easy to use word processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools akin to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The big difference between Docs and Microsoft Office is that your Google documents are stored online, so they’re accessible from anywhere you have Internet access. Docs can be used independently or as part of Google Apps, a software suite for schools and businesses that includes Website-building software called Google Sites.

Video: Google Docs in Plain English

How reliable is it?

Here’s Google’s official quick tour of Docs

Here’s a PDF overview of Docs if you’re the print and read kind of journalist.

Part 2: How to Use Google Docs as a Digital Notebook

Part 3: Is Google Docs Secure?

Part 4: How to Back Up Your Documents

Part 5: Google Docs Updates and New Features