Google Docs, Sheets and Slides

★★★☆☆

Google Workspace includes a fast, cloud-based office suite. It runs in most web browsers, the collaboration features are dead simple, and the mobile apps are decent. It auto-saves as you go and keeps a record of changes, so you can easily go back to an older version. Docs, Sheets and Slides are far less complete than Word, Excel or PowerPoint (or their LibreOffice counterparts), but they’re sufficient for most purposes. It’s the only online office suite I’ve used that allows you to share a document with comment-only permissions, which is kind of surprising.

Unfortunately it only runs in the cloud. (Even if you use the offline extension for Chrome, it’s still syncing to Google Drive when you go online.) And I don’t trust Google’s services any more than Microsoft’s these days. Back in the day I trusted that they wouldn’t use my writing for targeted advertising. Now I wouldn’t be surprised if they trained their LLMs on it even if they claimed otherwise, and it’s not at all clear in their privacy policy

I used it a lot during the 2010s, but I’ve switched back to using regular files and my own cloud sync when needed. Mostly plain text, Markdown and LibreOffice, except when I really need live sharing features.