For those who don’t know, Microsoft Office was once the dominant force in the software world. Microsoft had a monopoly on the industry for decades regarding commercial office suites such as word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.
However, that has since changed as more people adopt cloud-based solutions such as Google Docs, which offer similar functionality to MS Office at little to no cost.
What Google Docs Does Better than MS Office
While MS Office is still serviceable, Google Docs offers several benefits over the former.
Google Docs can be accessed from anywhere: MS Word is a desktop application, and you cannot access it without an internet connection unless you save your files locally on the computer or network drive. This makes Google Docs more accessible for those who need offline functions such as working in airplanes, long flights, or during natural disasters.
Google Docs is completely free. MS Office requires an expensive license if you need to use it commercially, and even education prices are exorbitantly high for many people who just want the tools they once had in their office suite. This makes Google Docs more accessible for those who don’t want to pay for MS Office.
Google Docs is much more accessible for mobile devices. MS Office still has a long way to go before it can compete with the ease of use offered by Google Drive on Android and iOS devices, especially given how MS Office doesn’t even work natively on Apple’s OSes.
Google Docs offers excellent collaboration features. MS Office limits you to one person editing a file at any given time. This is because it uses shared network drives that many users can access. On the other hand, Google Drive has a built-in document editing, which makes working together much easier and more efficient.