Google Docs Goes Back to School: Built-In Dictionary and Encyclopedia
Just in time for the back-to-school season, Google added some new features to Google Docs. Among these are a built-in version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and thesaurus, as well as the ability to look up any term in the Encyclopedia Britannica. You can also now highlight any word in a document to initiate a search in Google or Google Images. For now, these new features are only available in English.
Zoho, it should be noted, also features a thesaurus in its products, but it does not provide access to any dictionary or encyclopedia. One could, of course, argue that it is so easy to find this information online anyway, so that these built-in features don't really add much to the experience. However, being able to search a dictionary or encyclopedia right from the word-processor is very convenient.
In Google Docs, using these new tools would be a lot easier if Google had included them in the right-click menu or provided keyboard shortcuts for them.
Some More Important Features are Still Missing
Also, one feature that is still sorely missing and could make Google Docs a real alternative to Word for students is support for footnotes and endnotes. Both Zoho and Thinkfree Online already have support for these features.
Also, more and more students and college campuses are switching over to Microsoft Office 2007 and Google Docs can still not read the native Office 2007 .docx files. We can see why Google would object to this file format, but not supporting it only complicates matters for a lot of students.
It is somewhat strange that Google is partnering with these relatively old-fashioned companies, especially at a time when Google itself is replacing these already for a lot of students.
Comments
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Still more features missing is an understatement! Working on my English MA, I was thrilled to have GDocs as a resource. But in my work, I have found it to be more or less useless for one reason: formatting. Uploading and exporting to MSWord never preserves the correct formatting and printing from GDocs is not pretty (not to mention my profs require specific formatting.
Does anyone know if importing/exporting feature could ever preserve the formatting? If Google would improve the customization of printing OR exporting formats, GDocs, in my opinion would be a viable option. As nice as it is having your draft backed up in the cloud, its not worth the trouble in my opinion.
Posted by: DC | September 11, 2008 12:21 PM
This is a nice addition. Google docs is getting better and better all the time.
Posted by: Michael McGimpsey | September 12, 2008 12:37 AM
I'm not sure which "more and more college campuses" you're talking about, Georgia Tech is still using pretty old versions of Office. :-P
Posted by: Paul Stamatiou | September 12, 2008 7:45 AM
I'm also not able to open a Microsoft Office 2007 .docx file in Open Office 2.4. Their web site says it will be available in 3.0 which is available in beta. http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/announcementbeta.html
Posted by: Tony Neria | September 23, 2008 5:58 PM
Just a thought,
The citation and bibliography tool Zotero, a firefox plugin that manages your citations and keeps a library of references, has a plugin that will work with Google docs, allowing you to insert footnotes, endnotes, and entire bibliographies.
Posted by: Suzannah | September 23, 2008 6:59 PM