Google Docs
When you sign up for Google Docs, you're told that you'll be getting a beta product (albeit one that's being “tested” by an awful lot of people). I applaud Google for its honesty, because Google Docs has the feel of a beta product. It's not that the Web-based applications are unstable; it's more that they seem intentionally limited in scope to ensure their stability. The word processor, for example, has no support for footnotes, a bibliography, or mail merge. The list of available fonts is also kept quite small (in what may, for many users, be an act of compassion).

The word processor (screen image) betrays its Web roots with an offer to allow you to edit the HTML code for the document and create CSS that apply to your work. Aside from that, the basics of today's word processing are there: You can insert tables and graphical elements, count words, correct spelling, and perform essential formatting (so long as you don't go crazy with fonts).

Collaboration is handled through in-line comment balloons, bookmarks within documents, and the ability to share a given document among any number of users with Google accounts. The best news here is that collaborators don't have to share the same browser or even the same computing platform; a far-flung group consisting of Linux, Macintosh, and Windows users can all work together to create a finished document.

Google's spreadsheet is simultaneously the most frustrating and most powerful of the functions available in the suite. It's frustrating because it works so completely differently than a product like Excel. Take, for example, the process for adding a formula to a cell. Rather than editing it within the cell or in a formula bar over the spreadsheet pane, you click on a tab that takes you away from the editing window to a formula window. Once there, you can do many things, but in order to format the results, you have to click back to the edit tab.

The spreadsheet (screen image) is powerful because you can add plug-in functions to any spreadsheet. These plug-ins will let you display data in a number of creative ways, from power gauges to timelines to word clouds. Between the plug-ins and connections between the spreadsheet and various Google Web publishing tools, the Google spreadsheet may be the most powerful, easy-to-use tool for getting complex data published on the Web. On the collaboration side, there are revision-tracking tools that let everyone know who touched the spreadsheet and how, and spreadsheets can be exported to a number of different formats.

So is Google Docs ready to take over from Microsoft Office? Not in the current beta release. The fact is that there are just too many functions used in day-to-day office or academic work that aren't supported or are supported in a difficult-to-use fashion. Google Docs is great for collaborating across the Web, especially if the users are running a variety of different operating systems. For mainstream work, though, we'll have to look to other answers.

Jump to the review of each office productivity suite:
Google Docs
IBM Lotus Symphony
OpenOffice.org
Zoho