Google Shifts Editing From Drive to Docs and Sheets In 'Confusing' Switch 89
GottaBeMobile offers a better explanation than many other reports of a recent Google upgrade (some users would say more of a lateral move) that makes offline document creation and editing a first-class option for users of Google's office apps, but removes editing capabilities from Google Drive per se. Instead of creating or editing documents directly through Drive, users will instead be able to do this (including offline) with a dedicated app called Docs and Sheets. The article explains a few ways in which the new configuration is confusing, including this one: "Splitting out the editing functionality from Google Drive into the new Apps certainly seems odd given that fundamentally there are no new or different editing features offered in the new Google Docs and Google Sheets standalone Apps. Some users won’t appreciate having to download the new stand alone Apps to replace previous functionality, especially limited functionality."
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It's just Google being Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has a history of constantly tweaking their applications to the point of breaking them and/or making them less useful. There is a reason why the old saying, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" exists. The only thing they seem to get right is search. Yeah, Maps and Earth work well, unless your using Linux or an Android smartphone. Maybe they should focus on fixing bugs instead of creating new ones.
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Google has always had a "too many direction change" problem as their meritocracy sometimes tries things, and then end up giving up one idea to try another. If they really are an always profitable company, why is ticker GOOG in existance?
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Turn the screw until you hear a crack then back off a few turns...
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Since we're talking about Google apps, turn the screw until you hear a crack, then turn ten or twelve more times.
Re:It's just Google being Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, Maps and Earth work well
Maps used to work well. The recent new version is, unfortunately, a textbook example of the tweaking-to-the-point-of-breaking that you mentioned.
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I'm trying to avoid rebooting my computer to prolong how long I get to keep using the old maps. Streetview is a little better but why do the map tiles take three times longer to load?
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On android at least it's utter rubbish. It can't do anything without a data connection and the UI is just retarded. You can't (at least, the last time I bothered trying) save "where I am right now" as a location (no doubt they call them something retarded like an aspect locus) - it wants you to type in an address. If only there was another method - like, say, a pair of numbers of specifying a location...
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Check out "Copilot". It's $8 (for the North American version; other regions are a bit more expensive if memory serves), and downloading maps is its claim to fame. You download the maps for the regions you need via wifi, and it navigates you without ever needing a data connection. It also has traffic redirection like Waze, which is free for the first year and some trivial amount thereafter. It reads turn-by-turn directions via the Android TTS engine, so any voices you have for it will work.
The caveats are th
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This is true, I had an E71. I thought Ovi maps was clunky but at least it worked.
In fact, it's in a drawer somewhere, the battery's shagged. If we go to foreign parts this year I might get a replacement for it just to use it as a GPS, if I can't find something decent on 'droid.
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The big map companies (Navteq and Tele-Atlas) only do quarterly map updates. The raw map data is provided to the companies that subscribe who then transform that data into the native format required for their apps.
You can't update faster than the map provider gives you.
You'd think Google would have the advantage here, but their map data can be years out of date...
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That's intuitive, I don't know how the hell I missed that.
Which leg to I have to stand on while doing this?
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I am a user interface guy, and I promise you the kind of "throw **** at a wall and see what sticks", "always move fast and break everything" mentality that has invaded parts of the industry in recent years has nothing to do with creating a good user experience.
Good user experiences tend to require, among other things, consistent, intuitive, predictable behaviour. But you can't keep selling something that by definition isn't changing radically all the time, as if it's lots of different things that users shou
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Yeah, Maps works...Except that the Maps case is just like their online documents: someone made a better version
So, just like we use Evernote instead of Docs, Waze does a heck of a better job making me skip traffic jams to get home.
Yet ANOTHER thing Google doesn't do better than the competition...
Re:It's just Google being Google (Score:4, Interesting)
I find this is a common corporate problem, eventually a product just peaks out and does what it's meant to do, then you're left with a bunch of people who helped get it there left with nothing to do. So they keep trying to improve it beyond where it was already perfect, in the process breaking it, maybe because they don't realise they're finished or maybe because they need a justification to stay in employment. So we end up with buggy bloated pieces of crap. Office is one such product, there's very little a business needs that can't be done perfectly well using Office 97.
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"if it isn't broke, don't fix it"
FTFY.
3... 2... 1... there it is.
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Announcing Google FTFY Beta, an exciting new product to automatically correct your posts, past, present, or future! Join us on Google Buzz, for the latest news.
Update Google Plus
Update Google+
Update G+
Update #GoogleHashTagSupportIsLive
But have you seen the new GoogleMapDocDrive, now online. Now on your desktop. Now in your Android Phone!
For iOS so you don't need to go read. (Score:4, Informative)
Could someone not have mentioned that it was for iOS so I could have ignored it. Haven't used that since soon after I gave up on Windows. I'm sure there are several other Slashdotters still stuck on that, so it's fine to post such a story, but please make it clear for the majority of us who won't care.
Re: For iOS so you don't need to go read. (Score:4, Informative)
For android too.
As a non drive user, this makes sense. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really use these apps, bit why would something called Google drive be the thing I use to edit Google docs? Small programs that do one thing well and integrate with others makes a heck of a lot more sense then what appears to have been a poorly named monolith.
Re: As a non drive user, this makes sense. (Score:2)
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It actually started the other way around: what was originally Google Docs became (part of) Google Drive a while back.
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The nomenclature part of this doesn't bother me. I couldn't care less whether they call it "Google Docs" or "Google Drive" or "Google Kittens".
I very much do care, however, about needing to actually download and install an app to do something that previously worked perfectly well via website. I've always found Sheets a bit more cludgy than using Excel locally, but its online massively-
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They aren't taking away web editing. They're taking editing out of the mobile app.
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Oh! Mod this guy up. Summary is seriously confusing. They're just turning one iOS app into several. Nothing to do with anyone else...
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Google never made it easy to suck up data from the web and throw it on their spreadsheets.
Yahoo Pipes was much better, and other smaller software firms that went out of business.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ [yahoo.com]
Google only does search & ads.
Even programming languages: they hired Rob Pike. The man couldn't get the first one right (C), and that's supposed to be cutting-edge?!
Menawhile, Facebook is using D internally, and Microsoft rolled out F#...Google is mentally broken. Too many Java programmers at the GOO
So much.... hate (Score:2)
Look I broadly agree with you that Google today is no longer as good as they used to be, both in terms of their product and their "don't be evil" mentality/mantra/outlook.
But really, dissing their employees is a new low. Most of them have no say in the decision making process and are just working to make a living, like the rest of us.
And I had a look at your posting history. Do you realise that 9 out of your last 10 posts are nothing more than variations of "F*** Google"? And all in this same thread?
Tone it
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That's the way it used to be!
Google Docs existed before Google Drive. Shortly after Drive was introduced, they merged Docs into it. The existing domain docs.google.com redirected to drive.google.com after that point. I thought it was silly, as it seemed like Drive should have been the file manager (Windows Explorer) and Docs the office suite (OpenOffice).
I guess now they've concluded that too.
Mod This Up!!! (Score:2)
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Agreed. Even as a drive user, I always found it a bit weird that drive contained an editor for office files. A viewer - fine, that could be useful, but an editor? The division into a separate app makes a lot more sense. And I if there are hand over issues, I am sure they can be sorted out quickly.
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because your doc is on your google drive.. and they kind of killed docs naming for a while and everything is just on your google drive and not in your google docs..
it's all very confusing and apparently this is just for the phones and on desktop - or if you change your browser id presumably - you can still edit the docs by clicking edit on google drive..
Due to limits (Score:1)
The main reason they have done this is a massive problem I deal with every single day. BIG documents. I have numerous spreadsheets that hold tends of thousands (or more) of rows. However a browser based spreadsheet where the data is stored on the server is NEVER going to be as capable as a local application. Imagine how frustrated I am when sorting or creating pivots... I pull my hair out daily. They just don't want to admit that WRT this issue - they just "moved laterally" to a model of editing that is vir
Offline mode (Score:1)
There is no offline mode. You can open a document, but if you try to edit it, the app will try to open the document in online mode. This is one of the most requested features, offline editing, so naturally Google ignores it.
My uninformed guess (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like the code base has grown to the point that they realized it would make sense to separate the code for managing a collection of online files from the code for editing a particular file. So: Drive is the file manager, Docs is for word processing documents, and Sheets is for spreadsheets.
That sounds pretty reasonable, especially from a project-management perspective. De-coupling the code will probably allow the different teams to release updates as needed without having to be in perfect synch with each other's schedules. That is, they can submit a patch to Docs even if Sheets is in the middle of a major refactoring.
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De-coupling code is great. However, code refactoring should have no detrimental effects on end user experience. If it does, you are doing it wrong.
Your explanation implies a tail wagging the dog.
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This is often the case when a project is begun with insufficient foresight into what its technical needs might be down the road. This happens with evolving systems all the time. When the current architecture acts as a drag on development efforts, the architects must weigh the cost of a little temporary user inconvenience against the cost of maintaining a monolithic application.
When the tail is caught in the spokes of a wheel, the dog has no choice but to follow the wag'n. :-)
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Re:My uninformed guess (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:My uninformed guess (Score:4, Insightful)
It makes even more sense to decouple them when you consider another (now Google) product, Quickoffice.
Offline editing on tablets would be very nice, act (Score:2)
But this was just for iOS7? Or is it for Android devices too?
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Beta flag up? (Score:1)
Did Google take down the Beta tag on these logos yet? Remember, not all Beta projects make it to stable. A lot of people were using GMail before the Beta sign went down!
Hmmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
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ChromeOS...What a joke.
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In between MacOS and Windows 8, I don't think the average user of 2014 wants a broken, lame OS. If they did, they'd all be cool using some Linux distro (as for the "linux is just the kernel blah-blah-blah" - shove it...)
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I say cut out the sushi chefs out there on the GOOG's dependencies.
Make mutherfuckers eat pizza!
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They are, but you can get a bit of that back through apps script (I wonder how that will work in an offline paradigm, though...), along with scripted interaction between all your google docs - sheets, docs, sites, email, and others. There is ok and definitely not complete documentation, and the documentation that they do have really needs an offline option (it's a pain to navigate due to page load times....), but the level of potential interaction between those features is quite intriguing.
Re:Does anyone even use Google's office suite? (Score:4, Informative)
I use it for "simple" stuff - for instance, it's very convenient to have a place to take notes at meetings (I do a lot of that with my job). Since I always have wifi where I work it's just a matter of opening up the Drive website and creating a new document. And then everything's in one place and it's easy to find stuff with Google's search, which works on document names and document contents.
I do create some "production quality" documents from within the Docs world, and export them to PDF or DOCX so I can share. But these documents are generally simple; the complex stuff I do in LaTeX. I really do not like Word with its seven thousand ways to frustrate me and the weird layout that I've never really gotten used to since they majorly changed it years ago. Libreoffice and Google's docs editor are nice and relatively simple and I find them easier to use. But I go back to Word when I have to which is frequently since "everyone" seems to use it.
It's convenient to have the ability to open attachments (from Gmail) in Drive/docs for quick viewing, but stuff created in Microsoft's Office doesn't always convert very well.
I fully realize what Google is doing by "sucking me in" to their world and having everything I do be stored on their servers. Ever since I bought a Chromebook Pixel and got the 1 TB of Drive space, I'm always finding ways to use it. I know they just want to harvest everything I do - so for the sensitive stuff I have an encrypted (ecryptfs) partition with Dropbox that I can mount on my Linux machines, and for wholesale archival storage of sensitive stuff I use PGP and stick it wherever. If Google Drive allowed the ability to mount the drive partition under Linux like Dropbox does, I would probably "drop the box" altogether.
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Exactly.
How the fuck can you be such a software giant, use Open Office internally, and *still* SUCK SO MUCH?
Is Google - it begs the question - seriously BROKE? Is it too big to fail - and yet fail it does...
Is Google just a huge fucking A/B testing experiment (outside search)? It sure looks like it sometimes.
In my mind, it has created a reputation of being unreliable. Any product you look at, outside search, looks like A/B testing in the wild. Just look at their Android approach. They've released really bug
But people complained about changing it to Drive! (Score:3)
It used to be Google Docs, right? Then they decided it was a cloud storage product and renamed the whole thing (including the editors) Drive. This confused a lot of people who didn't understand why you had to download Google Drive to edit a spreadsheet. So now they have seperate products and people are complaining about that too?
I give up. I mean I'm broadly sympathetic to change aversion, but this isn't even that. It's just breaking out functionality into more rational chunks, and people complaining about it.
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Yeah, what's the point? Just use Drive for storage. Or maybe not even that.
Right now, millions of XP machines are getting warnings that Real Soon Now Google is not gonna support their browsing experience. So, no Docs or Drive there...
So, what you see is Google not making the internet something that Just Works. Aren't they supposed to be the huge software giant that did things differently? Oh, wait, that's Apple. What Google is hellbent on doing is dominating the browser platform. We're back to 1997. Your br
Features (Score:2)
They remove the feature which kept me from using google docs and sheets...
Explanation (Score:1)
Because the people of Slashdot are fucking stupid. Say I don't do editting or I just use drive as storage I don't need the added functionality, so why have it in the app. Say I'd like to open a document and spreadsheet I now can since before you couldn't with a single app.
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The point we're debating, and that you seem to miss, is: why make Docs if it's a lame ass piece of shit that does half of what OpenOffice does even though you stole their code?
Remember how they were gonna kill Microsoft Office.
Well, lo and behold, there's Office 365 for you.
What. The. Fuck. Google.
OMG (Score:2)
This is going to totally confuse users. They're moving document creation from the storage service "Drive" to the document service "Docs".
Great name! (Score:4, Funny)
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Google stop f*ing up Google (Score:3)
Dear Google --
You are your worst enemy.
Please, just stop.
First, a purported Microsoft Office-killer. Then, you lost space to Evernote. Oh. My. God. How can it be that small software houses beat you to the online document race?
You periodically either shoot yourself on the foot, or you pull features and leave your user/programmers feeling you're not reliable. Because you're not.
You have a serious lack of direction. Reconsider your ways.
Nothing you do outside search works. Or barely works.
And nobody uses Google+. Face it.
Please, just stop.
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Definitely. While search is extremely useful, I would say integral to the way I use the net now, I absolutely do not trust Google 1) to not abuse my data, history or anything important to business and 2) to maintain a usable service without wrecking it in a year. Due to their bizarre philosophy Google is constitutionally incapable of launching a trusted service. Everything on the menu is subject to destruction / morphing at whim. I have seen my decision not to use Google justified 2 or 3 times already. I wa
Marketing? (Score:1)
Maybe this is just a way to pump up the apps in the App Store after recent release of Office 365 on iOS?
DropBox (Score:2, Insightful)
And if one day DropBox becomes too evil or too expensive, I can transparently switch to an other solution to sync my documents without changing the way I edit them.