Google Docs opens heart to students

Mountain View has tweaked Google Docs to make the average schoolkid's working day even easier to cheat negotiate their way through. The search giant has added student-friendly features to Docs, which is part of the company’s Google Apps suite. It’s added an equation editor, allowing students to solve maths problems within an …

[The Original Ash]

Translation software helps learning a second language

Translation software can easily translate most words into their foreign equivalent, but they are still appalling at grammar.

My German teacher actively encouraged the use of translation software for homework assignments, as not only did it make "cheating" by using these facilities pointless and impossible (easy to spot several identical works), but it got us to re-read the entire piece and correct the grammar. It saved us time looking up every single word we didn't know in the dictionary, and it improved our reading skills.

[Magnus Ramage]

Prettifying...

... much needed! I like Google Docs very much, it's easy and lightweight and brilliant for collaborative editing (including synchronously). But I recently pulled in a simple Word document, edited it a bit with a colleague and output it as PDF and it made a right mess of the formatting. Maybe I just need more practice with it, but I'd have been quite unhappy giving anyone the GD version without reformatting in Word.

[J 3]

Er...

It's amazing our ancestors managed to reproduce before such amazing collaborative tools were bestowed upon us by Google...

[Britt Johnston]

so last millennium

Word and Word Perfect solved these problems in the DOS era, eliminating the homespun editor upgrades. Word Perfect had larger formatting problems going into the Windows era.

[Anonymous Coward]

Great

And then when they get a Blue Book Exam what do they do?

[Michael Wojcik]

Google's idea of "pretty"

If Google's idea of "pretty" is converting footnotes to endnotes, they need to stop. Substituting endnotes for footnotes is a sign of brain damage. Just because most editors are too damn lazy to deal with footnotes (the brave and bold souls at Critical Inquiry being one of the few exceptions I see these days) is no reason to praise the idea of moving information far from its relevant context.

No WYSIWYG "word processor" has ever done more than a mediocre job of formatting text. They've always been beaten by layout tools like Quark, when precise layout control was required, and whole-document semantic-markup formatting engines like TeX/LaTeX when it isn't.

GDocs is good for ad hoc drafting of documents in small groups. For sustained work it can't compare with a real change-management system, and its formatting capabilities are minimal.