3 Word Processors compared - Microsoft Word, Apple Pages and Google Docs

In the course of work and university I've been jumping a bit between Word, Pages and Docs for various reasons. I thought it might be useful to compare them. Let's start.

Price

• Google Docs is included either in a free Gmail account or G-Suite. Its available for free on your mobile device with native apps on iOS and Android
• Pages is $30.99 and can be found in the Apple Store. It's included in iOS on the iPhone or iPad
• Word is part of the Microsoft Office Suite. The cheapest of which is Office365 Personal (for Mac) which is $89 inc GST per year (See the Microsoft Office pricing page here). Includes a licence for a single mobile device

On price Docs is the obvious winner. Free to get access to and solid support on mobile devices. 

Usability

All three of these applications are very useable - but which one is *most* usable? Google Docs is a clean, uncluttered interface with relatively few options available:

Simple and uncluttered with everything there and looking like every single other word processor through history.

Pages has a different take on it, and one that can be a bit confusing to begin with.

The sidebar gets added into the mix, and many controls are moved out of the top menu and into here. I don't mind this personally, but I do find on the MacBook that I dislike losing the screen real estate to this menu. It is functional though.

Word has the infamous "ribbon". This is the Office365 version of it:

Since Microsoft changed the menu titles back to being in regular capitals / lower case, the readability of these menus has improved immensely. I remember when the ribbon came out and people loathed it. It just is now and I find it to be quite useful. The drawback for me with Microsoft Word is the sheer number of options available. We are spoiled for choice, control and capabilities and it can be overwhelming at times.

The usability winner is a totally individual choice and I leave it up to you to decide. Personally I like Pages but I'm ok getting around all three.

Functionality

This is a big one to consider. Word has clearly got it all (and most users will touch about 10% of it's capabilities day to day). Pages is likewise heavy on features and Docs comes in last, with its smaller range of functions. I think because Docs is web based then it was forced into more simplistic functionality and Google had to really choose the key word processing capabilities to include.

There is one function that stands Word out from Pages though in these heavy hitters. The ability to have a section in landscape, while the rest of the document is in portrait is not available in Pages (that I could find). Now most people probably won't care about this overly, but for me, if I'm inserting a large landscape graphic or big table it is critical and stupid Pages won't do it. Very frustrating. I've never really tried it in Docs, but a 3 second Google search shows it's not possible. Word wins for this!

All three offerings have Table of Content, header, footer, page numbers, insert stuff blah blah - you get the drift. All the basics and day-to-day stuff is there, and its only the more advanced activities where they are differentiated.

Aesthetics

Which one is the prettiest? A very subjective question of course. It should be noted that Apple have spent a lot of time on fonts and appearance, but so have Google and Microsoft (they just aren't as talked about). This is up to you - but I rank them Pages, Docs, and Word. Word is a bit busy for me - lots going on and when I'm working on an assignment or report I need clarity. Docs is very good for this, but something about the Pages appearance appeals to me.

Things to note about the different applications

Pages is Apple centric - don't bother looking for it on anything that doesn't have the Apple logo. That being said, it integrates very well with iCloud and syncs to your mobile device quite happily. 

Word is starting to become ubiquitous everywhere - Microsoft have released Office365 in a web browser, it's installable and available as an app on most mobile devices. The experience is the same across them all and really is improving.

Google Docs is maturing constantly and more features are being added frequently. For collaboration it is King. See updates and writing by other people in almost real time and easily give various levels of access to documents. For working with colleagues Docs is the best - Pages and Word are not in the same realm.

Things to remember - Google Sheets - how to show the last number in a column

I have a Google Sheets file that I put all the water information for our farm into. It's fairly comprehensive with formulas etc to let me know the following once I measure the water level from the top of the tanks:

• volume of water remaining
• amount used since the last recording date
• average usage since last recording date
• amount of rain we can have until the main collection tank overflows (so I know when to pump it up to the feeder tanks)

I would like a summary of the actual levels in each tank in a nice little chart that I can import into our personal intranet site hosted with Google Sites (this part is ridiculously easy), but I don't want to have to change the site information overtime I think about it. 

I found this:

=FILTER( A10:A100 , ROW(A10:A100) =MAX( FILTER( ArrayFormula(ROW(A10:A100)) , NOT(ISBLANK(A10:A100)))))

Now if you put that into a cell, alter the ranges to suit, it will give you the last number in the column (and maybe row, but I haven't tested that). It works very well - not only for numbers but for the dates as well. The little summary chart now shows:

• The Date of last reading
• amount of water remaining in each tank
• amount of rain we can store until the collection tank overflows

And with Google Sheets adding in some decent conditional formatting I have it all colour coded and it looks a bit like this:

Not bad eh? The bit that tells me the overflow is elsewhere on the page. And yes, we're in pretty decent shape given that it's the start of Autumn and we should get rain soon!

Google Sheets - inserting a static variable

Ever had a spreadsheet with set variables and wanted to use them in a formula but not have to type them over and over - just use the drag down feature and have it work? For example, if I had a formula where I wanted A3 to be present as part of it, and when I try to apply that formula to multiple cells the A3 becomes A4, A5, A6 etc? That's very annoying and up until now I've gone through and manually corrected it.

Not any more! By putting a $ sign in front of the column ID and the row ID e.g. $A$3 - it won't change! It stays the same! OMGWTFBBQ!

How long have I looked for this - I found the answer here: http://www.gcflearnfree.org/googlespreadsheets/14.3 - read up for more info! Yay!

The pure awesomeness of Google Forms

As a Google Apps reseller it never fails to surprise me how many people love Forms. I swear, I could nearly sell Google Apps to people just based on Forms. If you've never used it, here is a quick run down of what it can do for you:

• create a web form very quickly and easily, choosing from a range of different responses including:
• time (duration and date)
• multiple choice
• checkboxes
• create separate pages based on responses
• autofill a Google Spreadsheet
• automatically create a summary of responses with a range of different graphs and information instantly
• embed it into websites
• email notifications of changes and updates
• make you more popular with friends (OK maybe not this one!)

Some examples of how I use Google Forms:

• PC Audit
• capture make / model, RAM, CPU etc
• Job Audit
• bookings for jobs
• completion of job information
• Incident responses

Seriously they are awesome and if you're trying to do any type of statistics about stuff, they are a terrific place to start. Make sure though that your questions are good and that you choose the right type of responses to get the right Summary of Responses. It's cool though - you can change it even with live data in the spreadsheet. I have taught a friend how to work Google Forms in under 15 minutes - it is that straightforward. Enjoy!

The relevance of Microsoft Office in the Cloud based work environment

In the last few months several of my clients have made the jump from using Microsoft Exchange to using Google Apps. Initially this has just been for email, calendar and contacts but has since morphed into using Drive as well. At my office we have also made the change, but our split in staff - half telephony and half IT, means that the IT guys have really taken it on board, more so in fact than the telephony chaps.

Recently I was working with some gents from another organisation still using Office - we were using tethered laptops to exchange spreadsheets with simple data in them - at least they were doing it that way. I was getting the spreadsheet, importing it to Apps, updating it and sending it off. The beautiful thing was - I was doing it from my iPhone, HTC and my Google Nexus - same file, updating straight away and then emailing back to the guys - brilliant! And with offline files enabled it was even easier - I could still access files via Chrome and makes changes. The sync worked very well once networking was restored.

As more of my clients use Google Apps, more of them are questioning the need of having Microsoft Office on their PCs. After all, for the relatively low price of $5 per month per user for Google Apps Business software updates are included and the end user is always on the latest version of the office software - a definite advantage over the constant upgrade process one goes through with the various offices... not just Microsoft Office. Sharing files between people, both within the organisation and outside the organisation are quite easy. Even sending it to people without Google Apps is easy - files can be sent as PDF's or converted to Microsoft office files. 

Sharing and modifying files at the same time with people is easy, Apps notifies you of what is being altered and who is connected to it - a handy feature if, for example, two colleagues are updating a Sheet with details of different computers, without accidentally over writing the other person's data. Very useful. 

Anyway, this has been a musing - just something to ponder in quiet moments....

Google Apps and the Wonder that they are

Generally I've used Google Apps for mail and shared calendars and little else. I have, however, been asked to play with them to host a website and I've found them to be truly excellent in what they can do. Firstly a few tips:

• If you want your www.yourdomain.com to point to your Google Apps site, make sure you set up the "sites" page to something like sites.yourdomain.com and then create your Google site and point it to www. via DNS. A CNAME DNS entry will take care of this.
• Make sure your DNS is nice and tidy for all of this to work properly.
• When creating your site, if it's the site for everyone to reach don't forget to make it public.

There is a great range of templates and options for configuring your webpage and I urge you to play with them all. I've found many amazing different options for working with the site and the ability to easily use Google Maps and embed other things like shared calendars is terrific.

I've also found the response times from the Google App servers to be less than what they advertise. Today it was indicated it would take up to 3 hours for a change to complete and it was done in about 20 minutes. 

The email and calendar aspects of Google Apps are excellent, much like the Gmail offering from Google. I have a lot of documents floating around my Apps account and find that sharing this info with my wife works brilliantly. She is relatively tech literate and that makes it even easier. I've found with some of my clients who are not technical in any way, that Google Apps are intuitive and easy for them to work with. The interface is clean and very usable with being intimidating.

About the only gripe I have is that I like to have my Gmail and Apps accounts open at the same time in the same browser and it doesn't like that. Perhaps its more my work process there than Apps so I don't hold it against them.