#8: Review: Google Docs for IB- A free, lightweight alternative

Most people don’t think twice about choosing what program to use for productivity, and for a long time there wasn’t a real reason to: most of the other options were too clunky, not compatible, or were otherwise inferior to Microsoft’s productivity suite: Microsoft Office. Recently though, Google’s ecosystem of apps has shown signs of being a serious contender by adding much needed features previously only available in Microsoft Office, as well as its own innovations that integrate other parts of Google services. After using Google’s productivity apps (Docs, Slides, Sheets, Drive) almost exclusively for a year, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s almost (but not quite) possible to go through your IB journey without relying on Microsoft office.

Living in the cloud

Most of what the average student (or person for that matter) knows about Google’s productivity apps probably comes from the limited experience that they’ve had with group projects. Maybe Docs for a rushed piece of coursework, or Google slides for an ISO presentation. That wouldn’t be too far off from what Google’s productivity service stands for: collaboration. It's just the tip of the iceberg however, and there’s much more to it than what you would expect.

“Isn’t Google Docs only available online?”

Its entirely understandable to assume that Google’s apps are only available online, partially due to the fact that they run from web browsers, but largely because for the longest time they were. Things have changed a lot with the introduction of Chrome OS, with many improvements to offline usage being an area of particular focus. It all starts with Google Drive.

Google Drive

Google Drive is the one app binds the productivity suite together. So what is it exactly? Essentially, cloud storage: it allows you to store files online. Without paying you’ll be able to get 15Gb of storage for free but you can get more for a monthly fee or through perks. Just logging into my Google account on my Android phone gave me a free 100Gb! If you use Google’s documents don’t take up any space (they subsidise it for you), so if you do choose to do all your work in their productivity apps you won’t run out of space; I’ve used just 5Gb.

It wouldn’t be Google without search, and Drive does this particularly well. It scans through documents, using OCR to read through your pdfs and algorithms for identifying photos to categorize them. There’s something to be said about privacy though, and if that kind of thing makes you icky, Google in general might not be for you.

There’s a few ways to access your drive folders: on the web and on your computer. You’ll spend most of your time on the web interface throughout the browser, but you can (and should) opt to download the PC application for long-term usage. Enabling this allows you to back up your drive folders onto your computer, so you can look at your stuff from a file explorer. This also means that you have two backups of your work, so if Google’s servers crash (very unlikely) you’ll still have the local files. Accessing your drive from the phone app is also possible, and it's a great way to transfer small files or get productive when you’re desperate! All this makes work really portable: you could borrow a friend’s laptop without having to prepare a thumb drive beforehand, and printing documents from the library is pretty convenient.

Google Docs

Editing documents is the next step to productivity and Docs is the one that’s integrated into Google Drive. At first glance Docs might appear really simple and basic and that’s quite true - it just doesn’t have as many features as Word, and for good reason. It’s not meant to be a fully-fledged replacement for its more popular competitor, just something to give you what you need. When, for example, was the last time you used a mailing list? Or a signature line? For the sake of IB (or Express or IP for that matter), you won’t need most of those features. I for one am currently doing my EE, ME and other IAs on Google Docs and I haven’t run into major issues (as of yet). Documents also auto-save every time you make edits, and Google also tracks the changes you make, meaning you can roll back your document to a previous version at a whim.

That’s not to say there aren’t any things you might miss though. The lack of columns is a particularly jarring omission given how often I print chord sheets. Cross-referencing is also really convenient. Compatibility however, tops the list. Most of the problems arise when receiving word files; formatting can go crazy sometimes and I haven’t really found a way to do CAS forms without having the IB logo end up on a different row from the ACS logo. Exporting files on the other hand is no issue, simply download as pdf and you’re good to go. Finally there’s the lack of a spell check when offline: if you’re anything like me you’ll see red once you connect your computer.

Google Slides

The story for Slides is somewhat similar to Docs, but you’ll be surprised by some of the value added features included here. For one, you’ll be able to insert pictures just by inserting the URL instead of having to go through the long and laborious process of saving the image first and inserting it. Actually it's a theme across most of Drive, the web just seems seamlessly integrated across the whole platform.

Another standout feature: design. Here you’ll find some beautifully crafted (free) themes with an eye for detail that’s hard to match. Case in point - the colours. Within the best themes the colour seems painstakingly selected and adjusted to complement the palate in just the right way. Just look out for the theme colours when changing font colour; the (ex) art student in me couldn’t be more satisfied.

Slides also exploits the web, offering customisation and convenience in a way that Word never has - through fonts. Right off the bat the fonts provided by the themes are great, but should you find them lacking for whatever reason there’s a large library of fonts available on Google Fonts. Simply pressing “more fonts” when choosing a font will bring up a dialog box featuring all of the most popular fonts, and with the click of a button they can be added into your font library, no installation required. Even better - when opening the presentation on someone else’s laptop your fonts will still be there, with no compatibility issues.

Google Sheets

Sheets is almost exactly what you’d expect from Excel: all of the key features are kept with little change to the workings of the programme- number crunching, data processing, graphing and all of that. The most you’d use it for is probably for a science or math EE, or for administrative work. Some of the more notable and useful features include protected ranges, which prevent unauthorised editing of certain cells, useful for when asking people to fill in their particulars. There’s also the translate function, allowing you to use Google translate as a function to automatically translate text, which may come in handy if you ever decide to use Google forms to collect responses.

The IB factor

All of this presents Google Drive as an appealing replacement for Microsoft’s offerings, but is it possible to rely on it for your IB Grade? For the most part Drive holds its own, but in certain cases (mostly formatting though) you’ll have to further edit the file in Microsoft Word, a cumbersome and sometimes awkward workaround.

The biggest problem you’ll face is in formatting: adding in a contents page, bibliography etc. It's not that Google Drive can’t do those things, but rather that it's not exactly suited for the requirements of IB. Case in point: the contents page, formed automatically if you use the appropriate headers. While it hyperlinks each section of your work to the relevant portion of the document, it doesn’t add in the page number, which can be quite a hassle. That, coupled with the inability to convert footnotes to endnotes for easy bibliography can fill submission day with formatting desperation, as you rush to get your report perfect.

Other portions of the text can go off too, like equations and pictures. While easy to fix, they can be an annoyance if you’re already behind schedule.

What all this means for you, dear reader, is that for most IB documents you simply won’t be able to use Google Docs all the way through submission, so don’t uninstall Microsoft Office just yet. You can get pretty far using just Google Docs by building up the body of your essay and only importing it into Microsoft Word when you intend on submitting it, and so far that’s been the ideal solution for me.

Using the Google ecosystem of apps can seem overwhelming at first but once you get in it's hard to look back. The apps launch as quickly as Chrome does, and being able to do work and access all your files on almost any device (even if it's not your own) with just an internet connection never really lost it’s charm on me. That’s not to say that there aren’t other solutions to the same problem: Microsoft’s Onedrive has similar offerings with less free storage, but it’s an excellent service nonetheless. With all of Drive’s integration however, if you’re already an established Google user then I strongly suggest you give it a shot. You probably won’t regret it.

#JoelOng