Mountain View, California — Striving to keep its products and services improved up to the minute, search engine behemoth Google recently added new editing capabilities to mobile Google Docs, enabling the writing and editing of text and spreadsheet documents, but a newly-enabled desktop mode now lets any iPad user get Google Docs on the go, for real.
Many people have attributed to the iPad as a replacement for laptops, or at least netbooks. Google Docs, meanwhile, is supposed to take on programs like Microsoft Word. And now the latest version for the iPad empowers users to tweak fonts, styles and formatting as they would use the desktop version of the cloud-based app.
A post on the Google Docs Blog explained, “The new mobile editor is fast and lightweight, but sometimes you want to make more style edits like changing a font, or center aligning a paragraph. If you are on an iPad, you can do that by visiting the Desktop version of the document editor.”
It is not automatic, but clicking on “Desktop” mode on the bottom of any document you are editing opens up a Google Docs viewer/editor that corresponds to what you would see in any normal computer web browser.
Similarly, the post continued, “If you are working with Google Spreadsheet and wish to enter formulas from your iPad, you can use the same trick. Just click Go to spreadsheet view at the top of the mobile view to try out the full version of Google spreadsheets. You can now insert formulas in from the editable formula bar.”
Once you have discovered the perfect font or added that magical formula, you can move back to the mobile version appropriate to that iPad, iPod, iPhone, or Android phone. To access the new desktop offering of Google Docs for the iPad, users need to navigate to docs.google.com from the mobile Safari browser on their iPad. However the interface is a bit slow and reacts oddly to the iPad’s on-screen keyboard, but the ability to have full Google Docs functionality on the go is something most iPad users have been longing of for months.
Nevertheless, Google does warn users that mobile browsers are not as powerful as their desktop counterparts and taking advantage of this option may result in decreased performance. No amount of tweaking on Google’s end will make the iPad as powerful as a desktop, so using the desktop version of Google Docs on a daily basis is not recommended.
Expect more enhancements and tips to come as Google continues to add features. At least a few students and businesspeople are sure to appreciate the change, however, and it is possible this development will increase the popularity of both Google Docs and the iPad a little bit. Although, it is certainly not as scintillating as a new iPad, but it might help you get that promotion so that you can afford it when it arrives.