Docs

Let's say you have a rambling manifesto scrawled out in a Google Doc and you'd like to share a particularly illuminating passage with your friends or followers. You could share the entire document and add a message in which you explain where to find the crux of your argument. Or you could add a Bookmark and share a link that takes someone to a specific point in your document.

To add a bookmark, first move your cursor to the spot in your Google Doc where you'd to place the bookmark. Next, from the Insert menu, choose Bookmark. … Read more

We suggest taking a look at Carolina Road's Jarte, a free, tabbed-based, Word-compatible word processor built upon WordPad. It's fast and reliable, like WordPad, but it adds some features, such as single-click bookmarking, mouse scroll wheel cut-and-paste capability, and dictionary and thesaurus reference tools. Jarte is available in installed and portable versions; there's also a paid upgrade (still less than Word, though). The latest version of Jarte is compatible with Windows 8; we tried it in Windows 7.

Jarte's installer let us choose whether to install some components, such as dictionary and spell checker tools for … Read more

Microsoft enlisted former "Saturday Night Live" cast member Rob Schneider and disgraced baseball star Pete Rose to denigrate Google Docs in two new videos that posted to the Web Friday.

The videos posted on Microsoft's Office 365 blog suggest that users gamble every time they trust their productivity to Google Docs.

Of course, it's a time-tested strategy for Microsoft, which rolled out its Gmail Man videos two years ago, broadsiding Google's email service for its contextual advertising program.

In one of the new videos, two buddies hit a casino. One asks if they should play … Read more

Some Google Drive users discovered their list of documents to be empty on Friday, though the documents themselves appeared to remain intact.

Several readers reported the problem, in which the Google Drive page was devoid of Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides files as well as other files stored in Google's cloud-synchronized, Web-based tools.

However, at least in some cases, open documents still worked, new documents could be created, existing documents could be found through the Web page's search bar, and local search on a person's computer could retrieve files stored on local hard drives.

Google's status … Read more

If you're on a mission to have a fully mobile office, this app might seem like the answer to your quest. It offers to help you read Microsoft Office documents from any smartphone or tablet, but sadly, Office Reader is a massive disappointment as it offers limited functionality and is ad-infested.

This app only works with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but instead of letting you read the documents in their native format, Office Reader has to convert them to PDFs to display them. If you have a bigger file, that leads to a very long conversion process. It also … Read more

Direct browser support for Microsoft Office documents is coming in fits and spurts to Chrome. Google's latest effort is a portly extension for Chrome beta.

If you're running Google Chrome Beta on Windows or Mac, you can now install the Chrome Office Viewer. It will allow you to open links to Office files directly in the browser, a feature that was first announced with the Chromebook Pixel.

However, you're limited right now to merely viewing the files. To edit, you'll have to upload the file to Google Drive, or open it in Microsoft Office or another … Read more

Google users should once again be able to access their apps, files, and e-mail.

Following a service disruption earlier today that took down Google Drive, Google Apps, and Gmail, all three appear to be back in business. Google's Apps Status Dashboard page shows all three as accessible, with comments that the problems should be resolved.

Service disruptions also had affected Google Groups and the Google Admin Control Panel used by organizations to manage their Google Apps services. But the status page points to both of those as accessible once again.

The status page updates show that the disruptions were … Read more

I'm a cloud-computing, Chrome OS fanboy for the most part. But today was one of of those days I was glad to have old-school Mac and Windows PCs lying around my home office.

I'm no power user, but Google Docs suits me for word processing, while Google Sheets works fine for creating spreadsheets. However, when it comes to importing and editing files from the incumbent power, Microsoft Office, Google just isn't meeting even my low-end needs.

Google handles such documents -- in either the older .doc and .xls formats, and the newer .docx and .xlsx formats -- … Read more

Microsoft Visio is a professional drawing tool for creating charts, graphs, diagrams, engineering drawings, networks, layouts, and schedules to use in reports, documents, and presentations. With an extensive array of top-quality templates, Visio is both easy to use and sophisticated enough for professional applications, much like Microsoft's other Office tools. Visio is part of the Office suite and integrates with it in Windows, but it's not included with most Office editions; it comes in separate releases in several versions. Visio Professional is available in a free but limited trial version. All of Visio Pro's features work, but … Read more