Pros & Cons
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- Free
- Simple, elegant interfaces
- Support features, such as drop-down lists and voting by emoji
- Easy-to-use collaboration and revision history features
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- Complex preparation required for working offline
- Limited feature set compared with desktop suites
- Can’t open some large files
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides Specs
| Cloud-Based Apps | |
| Free Version Available | |
| Imports From PDF | |
| Links to Live Web Data | |
| Mail App Included | |
| Mobile Apps | |
| Online Collaboration | |
| Opens/Saves Microsoft Formats | |
| Records Macros |
Google's free office suite of Docs, Sheets, and Slides (officially known as Google Docs Editors) is unique for its ability to produce both traditional documents and those with web elements, such as drop-down lists and emoji-based polls. The apps' collaboration and revision history features work brilliantly, and we like the straightforward feel of both their interfaces and operations. That said, working in the programs offline is a hassle, and large documents can cause problems. Microsoft 365 is our Editors' Choice winner for personal office suites because its apps are available offline for paid subscribers, and even complex files pose no problems.
What Office Suite Apps Does Google Offer?
As mentioned, Google's suite includes Docs (documents), Sheets (spreadsheets), and Slides (presentations). I focus on those apps in this review, but a free Google account also gets you access to all of the company's core online apps, including Forms, Gmail, Google Drive, Keep, Meet, Sites, and more. Technically, all of these apps are part of Google Workspace; paid plans unlock additional storage, higher video meeting participant limits, and other corporate-friendly features.
Pricing: Free for Personal Use
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides are free to use in a web browser or on mobile devices (Android and iOS). Simply signing up for an account gets you 15GB of Google Drive storage to share across those content creation apps and Gmail. You can also conduct Google Meet meetings with up to 100 participants. Storage upgrades are available via Google One plans, which also come with Gemini features at higher levels.
Microsoft offers browser-based and mobile versions of its core office suite apps, including Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. Free account users get 5GB of OneDrive storage. To access 1TB of storage, office suite-related Copilot features, and the more powerful desktop-based versions of the office apps, you need to pay $99.99 per year.
Apple users get access to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for free, along with 5GB of storage. You can get more storage via paid iCloud plans or a few extra features by subscribing to Creator Studio. Meanwhile, LibreOffice offers free, open-source, and mostly serviceable office apps for every major desktop platform, with some cloud features in development.
Google's free plan offers the most generous cloud storage of all the above, though the local apps in the other suites remain more advanced.
What’s New in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides?
Even if you haven’t used Google’s apps for a while, you won’t find many big changes with the latest versions. That said, Google is constantly tweaking the apps to improve their interfaces and performance.
For example, Google Docs now has a useful feature that lets you split a long document into tabs, so you can switch between sections you would otherwise need to scroll to find. No other word processor supports this capability, however, so this structure won't survive an export. A relatively new Listen to This Tab feature promises to read the contents of a tab aloud, but, like many other users, I consistently encountered an “Audio generation was unsuccessful” error message during testing.
Google Sheets recently added a few new functions, including one that references an entire worksheet, and one that links to Google’s subscription-based BigQuery and Looker database services. Google Slides hasn't seen many changes.
Interface and Ease of Use: Simple and Elegant
Google’s apps have clean interfaces with modern fonts and sparse top-line menus, which you can hide entirely. The toolbar has clear icons, too. The design is exceptionally straightforward and well-thought-out, with only Apple's apps rivaling it in clarity. The mobile versions of Google's apps offer a dark mode, but you need to install a third-party add-on to get the same effect for the web apps.
If you can't find something in the menu, you can search for it in the Help box and open it directly from there. Unfortunately, the Help system doesn’t show you how to navigate to the same options on the menu if you want to find them again, an annoying oversight that also applies to Microsoft 365.
Docs: Getting Better All the Time
If you’re writing a student paper or a quick report, Google Docs gets the job done. But it doesn't offer the convenience of alternatives that work both on your local machine and online, such as Apple Pages and Microsoft Word.
It also lacks some professional-minded features. For instance, although Google Docs lets you create footnotes, you can't add endnotes. And even though I like its attractive document templates, you need to use complex third-party tools to create custom ones (Workspace subscribers can submit new templates to the gallery).
That said, I like the Hide Print Layout option, which removes the white space at the head and foot of print-destined pages. Both Word and Corel's WordPerfect offer the same capability. If you’re creating a document that you don't plan to export, the Pageless format shows how it will look in a browser.
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Several shortcuts underscore Docs’ online focus. To insert a drop-down or draft an email message, you do not need to search the toolbar. Simply type an @ sign in a document to bring up a menu that lets you insert almost any data from your Google account, from contacts to files. And as mentioned, you can easily conduct polls right inside a document.
Google Docs' performance has improved in recent years, but it still can’t handle very large files. It failed to import the 18MB Microsoft Word document I use for testing, while the same file opens perfectly in both the browser-based versions of Pages and Word.
Sheets: It Doesn’t Quite Beat Excel
Google Sheets can't match Microsoft Excel's high-end features and automated conveniences, but it performs feats that make it preferable for corporate users and others who need a full audit of changes. As with Google's other apps, you can view all changes to a document in chronological sequence. Sheets even lets you see the editing history of individual cells.
The spreadsheet app also has a native recorded macro feature, unlike Docs. Of course, it's still possible to program macros that optionally link to Google's APIs via the Apps Script editor in all of Google's apps. You can, for example, write a script to manage YouTube uploads from a Sheets worksheet.
Subscribing to Google Workspace gets you a few extra features in Sheets, including support for encrypted spreadsheets and those with more columns and rows of data. You aren't likely to run up against that latter limit with the free version, however.
Slides: Fast, But Not Showy
Google Slides is surprisingly speedy and elegant. It offers almost all of the dazzling effects of Apple Keynote and Microsoft PowerPoint. You don't get advanced editing features like sliders to trim a video, but you should appreciate the attractive templates and other conveniences, such as a Q&A history you can consult when you need to recall an answer you gave weeks ago.
Cloud and Sharing: Terrific Online, Awkward Offline
As you might expect, Google’s apps shine when it comes to collaboration and sharing. Still, Apple's and Microsoft's apps are equally powerful and efficient in almost every way. Sheets and Excel make it easy to restrict your collaborator’s access to specific worksheet ranges, for example, though this is less straightforward in Numbers. Keep in mind that you might prefer Microsoft's Track Changes feature to Google Docs' co-editing options; it often makes for a cleaner editing experience.
The main disadvantage of Google's office suite is that no desktop programs are available for offline work. Don’t make the mistake of assuming a home or public Wi-Fi network won't fail at the worst possible time. If you don't set up offline access to your files ahead of time, you won't be able to read, let alone edit, them when your connection breaks.
To prepare to edit Docs, Sheets, or Slides files offline, you must first install the Google Docs Offline extension in Chrome (and make sure that Chrome is your default web browser). Then, in Chrome, go to the URL drive.google.com/settings and enable the Offline setting. Next, go to your Google Drive directory, right-click each document you want to edit offline, and enable the Available Offline option (or open each document, go to the File menu, and click Make Available Offline).
Unless some glitch gets in the way—and glitches sometimes happen—you'll be able to click on documents in the Google Drive folder on your desktop and edit them in Chrome offline. If you don't see the Available Offline option, you probably work for an organization that disables offline access for its employees, as I once did. In that situation, I got offline access to files in my corporate accounts by sharing them with a personal account.
This preparation process for offline work still seems a bit ridiculous, considering that other office suites work just as well online as offline.
Document Compatibility: Where Google Falls Short
The most serious problem with Google’s apps is that their native file formats aren't broadly compatible. Instead, they use a highly complex variant of HTML, and you can see what it looks like by adding the string “view-source:” directly before the address of the current page in your browser. (This feature used to be available via the menu, but doesn't seem to be any longer.) If you want to edit a Google-based document or spreadsheet in a desktop app, download it in a Microsoft or OpenDocument format. Of course, if you want to edit it again in one of Google’s apps, you will have to upload it and deal with some minor (but annoying) formatting changes.
Google’s apps can import Microsoft and OpenDocument files, but almost no legacy formats. If you need to work with a variety of older files, LibreOffice is the best choice among office suites. Corel WordPerfect is almost as friendly to legacy documents, but even Microsoft’s apps won’t open many older Microsoft formats that may pose security risks.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Google)
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides
Google's free, online-first Docs, Sheets, and Slides are easy to use and offer powerful revision features, though competing office suite apps still have more robust capabilities.