Google has quietly updated the look of Google Docs, offering a more Microsoft Office (pre 2007) like interface.
First spotted by Philipp Lenssen, the changes aren’t huge, but visually they’re pleasing. Gone is the Google Docs blue background toolbar with its unique layout. In its place is a grey toolbar that will be immediately familiar to users of other offline and online office packages. Fonts now have a dedicated box with the list being rendered in the particular font listed. Text sizing also gets a familiar drop down box as well.
The changes have been rolled out across the three core Google Docs products (Writely, Spreadsheets and Presentations).
Although still not as fully featured as offline alternatives, and even some online competitors as well, Google Docs has gained strong support in the first adopter community and is slowly finding a market in the business world as Google pushes its corporate packages. The new look will make it easier for new users to immediately use Google Docs and that will help sell the package.
So…Google Docs 2008 looks like Word 2003. Only you can’t do about 95% of what you can do in Word…
Paraphrasing ES’s don’t-fight-the-internet, mightbe wise to also don’t-fight-the-[Microsoft-]user-experience… even they compete head-on!
And if even giants like Google “copies”, at least in this sense, guess it’s fair for the analysts and commentators not to fingerpoint the copycats left and right, of the worldwide scale.. in in particular, to those who copy Gmail’s UI…
Dear Mr. Arrington,
Google has also slightly changed the color in the letter ‘O’ in the logo to a bright shade of yellow, perhaps a new blog entry is necessary for that.
Stop fucking reporting stupid news. Who cares.
Cool
http://www.yooflix.com
@1
Yeah, only the 5% that represents 100% of what most people actually do with a word processor.
I have no doubt Google gears will give Google Apps the ability to work offline soon enough. Then they will be competing head to head on features & innovation. And then we will see what happens to adoption.
so did Presentations get the new menu or is it from Presentations? And why then is Spredsheets lagging behind… it seems backwards to me, the small fry does crap like that and they get raked over the coals but Google does it and it’s a big deal that 2/3 of their RTE toolbars are consistent… yay!!
the slack should go to the small fry and this reprehensible behavior ought to get Google berated and shunned!! hehehe… ok, so i exaggerated, but still.. it;s irritating that All of googles “Word” apps aren’t consistent… if they could communicate internally and unify their products’ brands then they might be able to start talking about being “usable” to the mainstream.
what ever game google playes
it has to follow the leader
5% functionality is the magical amount, just enough to hook ya, not enough to lay you out.
The magical amount…
Google = Libtard crapweasels….
Not only the look has changed. The “Save” button has become an icon.
Spreadsheetsn and Google Documents List (The list of all Docs, SPreadsheets and Presentations and Folders) also retains the old blue ribbon. My guess it will change.
I don’t know what will happen with the Spreadsheets Save button. Save is different in Spreadsheets. There it is auto saved much more often then in hte Docs, virtually every change is saved. So the old Save button was also an idicator of things being saved. It was convenient.
I guess I like the new look. Even more so, I like the fact the applications are being worked on. New features (and not only look, which some commenters argue does not deserve a blog post) come in all the time.
I do miss some Word functionality in GD. Mostly I miss Numbered headers and keyboard control of the hierarchical lists and shortcut access to my custom designed styles. But I guess everyone has his favorite one or two misses. All in all, GD is something I can use for most of the documents I write recently, and I feel more then compensated by the ability to share them. I am not throwing my Word, far from it, but things that are likely to need sharing i write directly in GD.
Yeah, I think I’ll stick to excel, last thing I want google knowing is my own data.
Nice to see another website publishing useless propoganda from Google.
A recent NPD report in the USA says:
94% of US consumers have never tried a Web based productivity suite.
A mere 0.5% have actually substituted web based suite for desktop suites such as MS Office. But NPD feel globally the figure will be dramatically lower.
You would think that from the characterisation of the writer of this article that Google was winning market share and succeeding!
FFS stop simply putting out press releases for Google and Apple on this site.
lol @ #13… i doubt Google issued a press release for this.
@ Anatoly,
I see what you did there.
Googledocs is provides 5% of functionality that is really useful and I use it daily, but I’d never publish and print out a real document in there. It’s more like wordpad than word. If MS put wordpad online and I’d probably use it instead.
The one thing Google docs does easily (and why I sometimes use it) is the multi user editing. That rocks. Other than that, Microsoft is WAY ahead.
Correction, it seems that only Google Document (part of Google Docs) received the design treatment. Presentation and Spreadsheet haven’t
Does it have paragraphs yet? I get tired of checking every time they waste time on bling.
I do like some of the changes and have found it easier to work with today. I only use it for some multi-user editing docs though, when I want to create something of any substance I don’t touch it – it always does something weird with my formatting.
nice!