Google’s translation service for Web pages is quick and usually gives a passable translation. It’s been a year since Google formally released Google Docs, a free Web-based competitor to Microsoft Office with parallel applications to Microsoft’s Word (text editing), Excel (spreadsheets) and PowerPoint (presentations). (It had been in beta-test status.) Microsoft has since started its own in-your-browser version of Office 2010, which I’m currently testing, but Google has built some wow features in to Docs that make it worth looking into as an alternative.
Four of them stand out.
Group editing – Have you ever huddled around one coworker’s desk to group-edit a file? Have you traded attachments back and forth in e-mail while on the phone with a co-author three thousand miles away? Google lets everyone sit at his or her own computer and gang-edit the same text, spreadsheet or presentation. Everyone sees the same copy of the document, and everyone’s keystroke-by-keystroke changes appear onscreen as everyone types. Microsoft has collaborative features in Word, but right now Google’s version is the winner.
It works the way a bunch of nonengineers would expect it to work. To let others collaborate, click the Share button in the upper right corner of the Google Docs interface and choose “Sharing settings…”
to add co-authors by name and e-mail address. A group of people who you regularly work with can also be defined. Google Docs will e-mail them a link to your shared file.
Language translation – Google’s translation service for Web pages uses a unique method of translation based on statistical analysis of phrases rather than word-by-word substitution. And it’s
enjoyably fast and in most cases gives you a passable translation. (It’s better with European languages.)
To use it in Docs, either use your cursor to select a passage to be translated or leave it alone to translate the entire document. Then click Tools on the upper left of Google Docs’ toolbar and choose “Translate document…” Google creates a new version of your document with the words translated in place. Your original stays intact. It’s your choice rather to switch to the new doc and continue editing, or to merge parts of the translation with the original.
Edit scanned documents – This feature identifies the written words in a scanned document, whether it’s a fax or a page scanned on an all-in-one printer. To use it, go to Google’s OCR upload page and upload a JPG, GIF or PNG file created from a scanned page. Google will create a PDF version of the document with text you can cut, paste and edit as if it were typed in. It’s not 100 percent accurate, but it saves most of the time you would take to hand-type it.
Self-updating spreadsheets – Do you have a market research spreadsheet that includes the price of certain stocks? Instead of pasting in a specific number that will be wrong by the time anyone reads it, you can put in a live link to Google’s current index of price, trade volume and other information on publicly traded stocks. (The info is delayed 20 minutes, so don’t try to beat Wall Street on trades with it.)
To pull in Google Finance data, you use the spreadsheet cell formula =GoogleFinance(“TSLA”), with the stock symbol in parenthesis to load the latest market price, in this case, for Tesla Motors shares. Google has a tutorial page and a video that goes deeper on advanced stock-info tricks, which include how to load live P/E ratios and news headlines.