So you’ve decided you want to go cloud. Or maybe you are a bit apprehensive and want to dip a toe in the water before you go the whole hog? This is fairly common. And understandable for that matter.
I’ve had a GMail account for years so I have been using ‘the cloud’ but have never really done anything with Google Docs. Until recently anyway. I had been using the beta of Office 2010 for a while but in the end didn’t feel the need to go out and buy it. So when the beta period ended and I could no longer use it, I got rid of it. That left a bit of a hole, which was mostly filled with Google Docs. I could simply upload my important documents with the built in batch uploader and away we go.
Having used Google Docs for several months now, I can say that it works well. As a way to dip your toe into cloud for free, you can’t really argue with the value. But here’s the rub. I have documents all over the place and just when I thought I had uploaded them all, I found another obscurely named folder with some files I needed to view to see if I should keep them or not. I didn’t want to upload and convert each one manually so I went looking for another solution.
You would think it would be simple and that a quick Google search would have you floundering in a sea of applications that would let you view these orphaned Word and Excel documents easily. But no, that really isn’t the case. I had almost given up on it when I came across GDocsOpen. They offer a free trial so I thought it had to be worth a go. A 744kb download and trial registration later, I’m ready to go.
Installation is just a next, next, next, finish kind of affair - pretty straightforward. Once registered, you are faced with the options page which asks what kind of documents you want to associate with the program, and of course your Google credentials. Then you are ready to go.
Finding an Excel file to test it with, I double-clicked and waited for the magic to happen. You get a spinning wheel which sits for a few seconds but then your Microsoft Office file opens up in Google Docs, inside GDocsOpen. By this point it has already uploaded and converted the file for you. If you are an impatient person like me, the process can seem a little slow but compare it to uploading manually and there is definitely an efficiency there.
If GDocsOpen finds that you have the file in your Docs repository already it will prompt you for which copy you want to open, or if you want to discard the local copy and just open the Docs copy. If you choose to just open the remote copy, when you come to save and close, you have the option to sync your changes to both copies, which is a nice touch for toe-dippers. It also means you can essentially use it to backup your Google Docs locally.
So the application doesn’t do a great deal but it does remove a few clicks and a bit of manual effort. Overall it is a pretty nice little app that fills a hole that nobody else seems to be trying to fill. There is a free 7-day trial available ($9.99 to purchase the full version), so if you are wanting to dip your toe in the cloud, it has got to be worth a go. Click here to view the website.
I’ve had a GMail account for years so I have been using ‘the cloud’ but have never really done anything with Google Docs. Until recently anyway. I had been using the beta of Office 2010 for a while but in the end didn’t feel the need to go out and buy it. So when the beta period ended and I could no longer use it, I got rid of it. That left a bit of a hole, which was mostly filled with Google Docs. I could simply upload my important documents with the built in batch uploader and away we go.
Having used Google Docs for several months now, I can say that it works well. As a way to dip your toe into cloud for free, you can’t really argue with the value. But here’s the rub. I have documents all over the place and just when I thought I had uploaded them all, I found another obscurely named folder with some files I needed to view to see if I should keep them or not. I didn’t want to upload and convert each one manually so I went looking for another solution.
You would think it would be simple and that a quick Google search would have you floundering in a sea of applications that would let you view these orphaned Word and Excel documents easily. But no, that really isn’t the case. I had almost given up on it when I came across GDocsOpen. They offer a free trial so I thought it had to be worth a go. A 744kb download and trial registration later, I’m ready to go.
Installation is just a next, next, next, finish kind of affair - pretty straightforward. Once registered, you are faced with the options page which asks what kind of documents you want to associate with the program, and of course your Google credentials. Then you are ready to go.
Finding an Excel file to test it with, I double-clicked and waited for the magic to happen. You get a spinning wheel which sits for a few seconds but then your Microsoft Office file opens up in Google Docs, inside GDocsOpen. By this point it has already uploaded and converted the file for you. If you are an impatient person like me, the process can seem a little slow but compare it to uploading manually and there is definitely an efficiency there.
If GDocsOpen finds that you have the file in your Docs repository already it will prompt you for which copy you want to open, or if you want to discard the local copy and just open the Docs copy. If you choose to just open the remote copy, when you come to save and close, you have the option to sync your changes to both copies, which is a nice touch for toe-dippers. It also means you can essentially use it to backup your Google Docs locally.
So the application doesn’t do a great deal but it does remove a few clicks and a bit of manual effort. Overall it is a pretty nice little app that fills a hole that nobody else seems to be trying to fill. There is a free 7-day trial available ($9.99 to purchase the full version), so if you are wanting to dip your toe in the cloud, it has got to be worth a go. Click here to view the website.
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