I have found it possible to create documents in Google Docs that it is impossible to convert to MS Word docs, or download or email. In such cases you can only copy and paste. Some Google docs can’t even be opened by Google Docs. If these are things that I’ve come across, as a fairly light user, it means that there’s a nest of other bugs waiting. Google needs to spend time stabilizing its Docs platform more than it needs to add new features.
But if Google is thinking of new features, user-customized templates should be introduced to standard edition Google Apps or regular Gmail users, and it would be nice to see shared folders. For both of these features I found workarounds*, but these shouldn’t be necessary.
* The workarounds:
– for templates, create a “Templates” folder, create a new template. Open the template as a document, and just remember to change the name to something else. If you make a mistake and change and save the template, you can always revert to a previous “version”.
– as a workaround for the absence of shared folders, I create folders in a shared Google Site, then place links to the documents there. Update: Google has just introduced a shared folder feature (see The Next Web article from October 12) This shares a folder with all of its files. But does it allow another user to place files there? If so, it isn’t clear from Google’s explanation.
