Have you ever accidentally deleted the 10–page essay you spent hours writing, terror and adrenaline coursing through you as you hurriedly try to figure out how to recover it? If you’re a Google Docs user, have no fear, with instant Cloud backups and a lengthy edit history, your document will recover. However, for all of the Microsoft Word users in the world, that 10–page essay might be gone forever.
As my fingers type across the keyboard and the black words pop up on the Google Doc that currently houses this article, I feel a sense of reassurance that I’m on the right platform to convey my words and thoughts. Google Docs’ usability is one of its best qualities— how easy it feels to use each feature and the various ways to find each tool. I enjoy the many ways that the site encourages users to collaborate, and while we might have all had the awkward feeling of watching someone’s username pop up in our document to add or make changes, Docs allows the closest thing to two people trying to write on the same piece of paper at the same time with great ease. As somewhat of a biased source, ever since I got a computer in the seventh grade, I have used Google Docs.
Lila Coleman ’28 claims that she “used to be a Microsoft Word girl,” but due to increasing pressures from schoolwork and classmates to confirm, made the switch to Google Docs halfway through high school.
“I liked the ability to type my essays offline,” Coleman states. “I didn’t need wifi to do anything, and everything felt more simple. Using Word seemed closer to the act of writing down my thoughts on a piece of paper. No commenting on documents or tracking editing history, it was the good old days.” While I empathize with Lila’s feeling of the comfortability of a site, for me, it’s Google Docs that offers it. It’s true that Microsoft Word might have a wider range of formatting options and is known to be more of a business industry standard document typing tool, so why isn’t it the most common platform here at Bucknell? If it has such a good reputation in the business world, should we all be switching to a platform that might better prepare us for our future jobs?
“I don’t use Word,” Eddie Kohn ’28 claims. “Word’s better because it’s faster. But Google saves all your work automatically, which is nice.” The duality of Eddie’s feelings is something we can all relate to, as Bucknell seems to contain a large majority of Google Docs users. The underrepresented Microsoft Word-ers out there might still feel like their site isn’t getting the credit it deserves. There are pros and cons to both sites, and while I will sit adamantly on my opinion that Google Docs is superior in its usability, I cannot completely refute the argument for Word. On other matters of the Google/Microsoft debate, there is one instance where Microsoft has Google beat, and that is with Excel.