Google Office vs. Microsof Office y otros

October 15, 2020, by Santiago Comment

The applications to work with documents on the cell phone are the most essential because we will always need to view or edit text documents, spreadsheets or even presentations on the mobile. Maybe that’s why Google acquired the app in 2012 QuickOffice (a single app that contained “Word”, “Excel” and “Power Point”), but only a couple of years later he discontinued it. Currently that QuickOffice is divided into three independent applications: Google Docs («Word»), Spreadsheets (“Excel”) and Presentations («Power Point»).

There is not a single Google office app

That is the first difference of this “Office” package for the cell phone offered by Google vs. the rest of apps like the powerful Microsoft Office or less popular apps like WPS Office or AndrOpen Office– You must install three different applications to be able to view or edit all these documents.

Although Google “integrated” these apps into its Google Drive app, it is not really a complete integration, because Drive still relies on those three apps to create or edit these documents, as you can see in the image above.

Doesn’t have all the tools

After taking a look at these Google apps I have realized that they are quite simple. If you just need to open or view text documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, they will work just fine. Also in case you want to create a basic text document, change the color of the text, make bold or italics, align or put bullets. In the case of Excel, if you only want to insert formulas, you will find all the ones you need.

However, if you want to insert shapes, format in columns, put headers and footers, equations or make more complex edits in a text document, or create charts in Excel, format cells, etc. Google’s Office apps won’t work for you. To work with more professional documents on the cell phone, although you could use the web versions of Google Docs, they are uncomfortable to handle on the mobile. So you may want to look for a more powerful Office app like Microsoft Office, available on the Play Store, whose great advantage is that it offers you all the document editors in a single app.

The good thing about “Google Office”

If you touch the three dots button in the Google documents app, “Share and Export”, “Share”, or touch the add user icon in your spreadsheets app, you have the option to add people to the document. In other words, you can create and edit the same document between several people (collaborative editing). This invitation can be made by email or through a public link, for example to share in a WhatsApp group.

Additionally, you can add people to the document with limited permissions: who do not edit it but can only read the document or can only read and comment on it.

Conclution

The Google Office mobile apps, Text Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations, are utilities for viewing this type of files and creating not so complex documents on Android. They also allow multiple people to edit a document remotely. Their disadvantage is that they are independent apps that must be installed or updated separately. And they don’t offer all the editing or formatting tools that do exist in their respective web versions. The alternative is to use more complete apps like Microsoft Office.

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