Feb 04

This is a genius feature they just added to Gmail:

gmailOpenAsGoogleDoc.png

Sending word docs back and forth over email sucks- it’s messy, you never know who has the most recent version of the document and the potential for overwriting and losing changes compounds exponentially as more people get involved. Google Docs is a great free service we used with our PR agency to collaborate on press releases. It allowed four of us to revise the verbiage without any questions of who had the latest copy. And it tracks revisions so that you can still get back to an earlier state of the document and see what changes have occurred between each revision.

This new feature in gmail seems to actively scan your attachments to determine if one of them is a word doc and if it is, you get a link to open it as a google doc rather than having to download it. This feature alone is reason enough to get a gmail account if you don’t already have one and should helpful for companies that are forced to deal with inbound word docs.

UPDATE: apparently this isn’t rolled out across all gmail accounts. Not sure why I’m seeing it- leave a comment if you have it in yours.

6 Responses to “Open as Google doc – new Gmail feature”

  1. noah kagan says:

    I saw it awhile ago and I have been seeing it recently in my account as well.

  2. JesterXL says:

    Got it mine. It’s Word parsing is pretty good at retaining the exact formatting; I was impressed. I don’t have Office on my Mac, so it’s a nice way to view docs without having to convert to PDF. I can just send myself an email and access there.

  3. sean says:

    yea the parsing is excellent. it will be interesting to see if Google can add support for PDF’s or if Adobe will prevent that.

  4. Chris says:

    I have been using Google docs as well and really like it. The Gmail integration is a nice plus. It’s great for all sorts of documentation, and speeds up collaboration.

  5. Alan says:

    Yeah, got it about 2 weeks ago, saved my butt on a messed up project.

  6. Alan says:

    Yeah, got it about 2 weeks ago, saved my butt on a messed up project.

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