“Google Docs, the free Web-based office suite from the search giant, now offers some partial but still valuable support for PDF files.”
Search engine giant Google Inc. last week announced a fascinating improvement for Google Docs, released an update to include PDF support, adding one of the most popular online documentation and form format to their free suite.
In fact, there are scores of users who have been missing the PDF format in the above list, and seemingly there has been a continuing demand from Google users for quite some time, the company has announced that importing and sharing PDF files using Google Docs is now possible.
The adding up at this stage does not include editing or saving PDFs, only the ability to read PDFs and paste into fields. With Google Docs support for PDF files, you can upload, preview and share PDFs.
The preview capability is quite akin to what is available on Google Books http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search preview, and operates nearly the same way as your typical PDF preview viewer.
However, it is a leap from having no PDF support at all, particularly as other document-distribution tools like Scribd and Docstoc have ensured that nearly all file types can be uploaded and viewed across computers and browsers.
Google Docs, until now in beta testing, competes with Microsoft Office but is relatively primitive when it comes to feature support.
Basically Google Docs as a whole does suffer from a bit of a feature-lock, in that suites like Microsoft Office and OpenOffice have a veritable horde of functions at their disposal. Still, if you like the idea of office document collaboration, it’s a fantastic tool.
“Once PDF editing options are added into Google Docs, the effectiveness of this app will shine.”
However, the feature is only a few days old – and will likely be even more smoothly integrated into the suite soon. To get started, users can simply click the Upload button in the Docs home toolbar, and select a PDF file from their computer.