Who remembers 2006?
12 years ago, Google launched a truly innovative suite of products to compete with Microsoft’s behemoth Office suite called “Google Docs and Sheets”.
This promised to revolutionize the way we work.
Instead of having to email Word and Excel attachments to co-workers and worry about old versions, conflicting changes, etc., the document was hosted in one place, and everyone could always access and update the very latest version with no fuss or muss.
Cloud Computing was The Next Big Thing™* and everything was going to be better!
*NOTE: Cloud Computing was not really new, but more a reboot of networked timesharing from the 60s and 70s distributed on a global scale. But that’s another story for another time.
Fast forward 12 years, and Word and Excel files are still everywhere!
Now, there are still a few cases where Docs and Sheets are missing features that Word and Excel have.
For instance, I sometimes miss the automated hierarchical numbering via Styles that Word provides for long documents like technical manuscripts.
But let’s face it, most people don’t even know this feature exists, and if they did, wouldn’t need it.
95% of the time, an online word processor or spreadsheet does everything you need and more. Google, Microsoft, and many other companies offer these services free for personal use.
Google even lets you back up the raw data for free, if you’re worried about it becoming “lost” in the cloud. (Trust me, it’s far more likely you’d lose it on your own computer due to hardware failure.)
So tell me everyone: What gives?
Why are we still using attachments in 2018?