Google Docs – create, edit, save, download free Microsoft Word documents

In some previous articles, I’ve discussed the free options available to you to view / create / edit / save Microsoft Word documents, you can see those articles here: using Adobe Buzzword, using Zoho, and using Word Viewer (only view and print options). In this article, I’m going to discuss, another excellent free option available to you for creating, viewing, editing, saving, printing, or downloading a Microsoft Word document, and this is Google Docs which is a feature-rich online word-processing software. You don’t need to install any software on your computer. Moreover, it can also save / convert your documents in PDF format.

Google Docs is available online and is absolutely free. You can access it by having a free Google Account. If you don’t already have a Google Account, don’t worry; you can create your free Google Account in a minute by just providing your valid email address (any email address will do, it need not necessarily be Gmail) and selecting a password.

Google Docs allows you to create not only documents (equivalent of Word documents) but also spreadsheets and presentations. In this article, however, I’m discussing only about documents.

It allows you to easily create, share, and edit your documents online. Some of its main features with regard to documents (equivalent to Word documents) are:

• Create and edit documents at Google Docs from scratch.
• Upload your Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or plain text documents from your computer and edit them or convert them to different formats, including in PDF format.
• Download (export) and save your online documents from Google Docs to your computer in many formats such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer, RTF, plain text, HTML, PDF.
• Store your documents online for free.
• Edit / share your documents online simultaneously with any other person of your choice who may be located in any part of the world, and also invite other persons to view such document.
• In case the document is edited by more than one person (as per your own choice), keep track of who made what changes to a document and when, and roll back your document to any earlier version. This is due to the feature of revision history that allows rolling back document to an earlier version.

• Directly publish your documents online to the world at large, as web pages or post these documents directly to your blog.
• Email your documents as attachments.
• Print your documents.

Creating a document, including from thousands of templates:

Google Docs allows you to create a new online document from scratch, or you can upload an existing document from your computer, or else you can use a template from Google’s templates gallery which has thousands of templates using which you can create your new document.

Editing and formatting your document:

Google has several rich features for editing and formatting your documents. While some of these features may not match the variety offered by Microsoft Word, but then these features will meet almost all your editing / formatting requirements. Word can be an over-kill on most occasions if your document does not have some special requirements. Moreover, Google Docs has some unique features, such as creating or editing a drawing from within a document. It offers following main editing / formatting features:

• Apply different font types, font sizes to your text.
• Format your text as bold, italic, underline, superscript, subscript, strikethrough, etc.
• Apply different styles to your selected text such as Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.
• Apply different text colors or text background colors.
• Insert numbered lists or bulleted lists.
• Align your paragraphs as left-aligned, right-aligned, center-aligned or justified from both sides.
• Increase or decrease indent of your paragraph as per your choice.
• Have custom line spacing, document background color,
• Spell check of your document contents in the language in which it is written. It supports a large number of languages for checking spelling.
• Translate your documents by click of a button from one language to another directly from within Google Docs. Dozens of languages are supported for translation purposes.
• Select different page sizes, different page orientations (portrait or landscape), select page margins as per your choice.
• Use Page Preview feature to view the document as it will appear before actually printing it.
• Insert footnotes in a document.
• Different users can insert their comments that are shown in a separate style.
• Insert an image in your document from your computer or directly from a web address. Manipulate the image as per your choice.
• Insert drawings. Create your own drawings directly within a document. It has some good drawing features that may perhaps be better than Microsoft Paint in many respects. Edit these drawings as and when required at a later stage.
• Insert tables with rich and customizable features, such as rows, columns, height, width, layout, border, colors, margins, padding, alignment, spacing, etc.
• Insert links to web pages, documents, bookmarks, email addresses.
• Insert mathematical equations with rich set of features. You can insert most mathematical symbols and Latin characters. Use inbuilt Equation Editor for this purpose.
• Insert page breaks for printing purposes.
• Have headers and footers appear on each page with customizable text / features.
• Create and insert an automatic table of contents with several customizable features.
• Look up any word used in the document for definition, synonyms, encyclopedia entries, or for quick translation into any supported language.
• Search a word used in the document on web for normal text search or for image search, directly from within Google Docs.
• View stats about document using Word Count. It will show various interesting statistics about your document.
• Download (export) and save the document to your computer in any of the following formats: Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx), HTML, rich text (.rtf), PDF, plain text (.txt) or OpenOffice.

Google Docs is an excellent option for those people who don’t create too many Word documents and for that purpose they don’t have to spend money to buy a desktop word processing software. Since this software is available online, you can access it from any computer that has Internet connection and if your documents are stored at Google Docs online you can access them easily from any place and any computer. Moreover, if you’re preparing a document in collaboration with other people, then definitely Google Docs is perhaps the best option since it allows online sharing and co-authoring of a document. You can easily invite other people to edit the document just by sending the link to the document in an email. You can also allow other people to view your document by sending the link.

If you work from your home and office both, Google Docs is a good option for you since you don’t have to transfer documents from one computer to another. Another good feature is its ability to convert a document from one format to another. So, you can easily convert your Word document into a PDF file (also see, my earlier article Convert Microsoft Word documents into PDF using Google Docs). Google Docs also offers you free online storage for your documents. Best of all, it has the “Google” backing that can assure you of its safety and quality. So, try it, if you’ve not tried it earlier.

Watch the following YouTube video from Google to learn more about Google Docs:

You can also watch the following YouTube video on Google Docs:

• Create free online Microsoft Word & PDF documents and download them
• Convert Microsoft Word documents into PDF using Google Docs
• Create Free Word documents at Adobe Buzzword & download as Word / PDF files
• Download free Microsoft Word Viewer for Word documents
• Translate Google Docs documents into 42 languages
• Download all your Google Docs documents in a single Zip file
• Create and edit PDF files free with OpenOffice
• Students will find Google Docs more useful now
• Free download Microsoft Word 2010 Beta version – See Main Benefits
• Convert Microsoft Word documents into PDF using Office 2007