Google Announces Google Docs & Spreadsheets

October 11, 2006

Ever found yourself trading email attachments with several colleagues, trying to collaborate on a document, only to have someone chime in at the last moment with corrections to an outdated version? Or emailing yourself a document just so you can move it from one computer to another? What about trying to manage a large guest list -- say, for a wedding -- when you have updates coming at you from all different directions and at all different times of the day, with other people trying to make their own changes?

Today, at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Google launched a solution to these collaborative and document-management challenges. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a web-based word-processing and spreadsheet product that makes it easier for people to create, manage, and share documents and spreadsheets online. Google Docs & Spreadsheets integrates Writely and Google Spreadsheets into a single, easy-to-use product that takes an innovative approach to a very specific problem in the productivity-software space: enabling people to manage and collaborate on the documents and spreadsheets they rely on in their personal and professional lives, no matter where they are or when they need to access them.

With Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google is taking a set of important tasks and offering an online solution to completing them individually or with a broader group. With a Google Account, a compatible web browser, and an Internet connection, users will now easily be able to:

-- Create documents and spreadsheets, and then manage and access them in a single, secure location

-- Easily collaborate with others, online and in real time

-- Export to and import from a wide variety of file formats

-- Share them with others as view-only

-- Publish them to a blog or as an HTML page

Simply put, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is focused on providing users with an innovative and efficient way to create and share information on the Web.

There are many products in the productivity-software space, addressing a broad range of user needs, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets is intended to both complement these existing solutions and introduce new ones, adding its collaboration and document-management features to the productivity options people already enjoy.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is currently in beta, available for free, and open for sign-ups. To learn more about the product, visit http://docs.google.com/.