Google Docs: Fill & Download for Free

Google? Hell no. Google seems to be rolling its own, built inside Google Docs. And Google has a secret weapon: an enormous pool of people feeding data to its insatiable machine learning maw. (Google Docs makes suggestions, and you can click on a suggestion to provide feedback like “Suggestion is Wrong.” I write books in Google Docs, and I’ve shoveled data down the Google machine learning orifice countless times.)Microsoft? Hard to say why they would. To integrate into Office 365? They already have their own grammar checker. I mean, it’s unintentionally hilarious sometimes, like much of what Microsoft does, but it’s hard to see how they’d make the economic decision between “buy Grammarly” and “invest that much in Office” and come out the other side concluding that buy Grammarly was the right thing to do.

Google Docs.I don’t use fancy writing tools. I don’t set up outlines in Scrivener (I bought a copy a while back and then never used it).I create a file in Google Docs for the outline and a file for the story and I link the outline with hyperlinks to bits of the story. That’s it.A lot of folks I’ve talked to who want to be writers ask about the best tools, the best software, the best outline format. In a way, they’re like people who want to exercise so they go out and buy a garage full of exercise equipment.The tools don’t make you a writer any more than the equipment makes you exercise. You become a writer by writing.Some of the greatest works of literature were written with a pen and paper.I use Google Docs because all my fiction is co-written with others (co-creation is my love language). Google Docs is a mediocre word processor. The best thing you can say about it is it records what you type and isn’t as relentlessly bizarre as Microsoft Word.The one, only, sole thing it has going for it is that for collaborative writing, it is so much better than anything else out there that from where it’s at, every other writing app in existence is merely a distant speck in the rear view mirror. But other than that? “Aggressively mediocre” is the best it gets.The thing is, the tools don’t make the writer. Writers write. I outline in Google Docs and I write in Google Docs, because Google Docs allows one to record words in tangible form, and that’s what writing is.

Google docs is like this:Light weight, comfortable, handy. But, you cannot take that for a war compared to this:Excel is a full blooded data engine. When added with a number of premium extensions, you can build power data models and statistical analysis. Of course, as someone in the comments noted there are some way powerful data languages/tools like R. But, you don't take a machine gun for a knife fight. It is an overkill for most Excel users.