Lately I have been weaning myself off Google. The only Google services I still actively use are YouTube, Music, Android, Gmail, Chrome and, to some extent, Maps and Search – but the last 2 services are ones I am trying to replace with MS products.
Lately Google has been getting on my nerves quite seriously, because it is practically not evolving at all and at Google they are asleep. When it comes to introducing new features and products, Google might as well, compared to MS, just go and bury itself. The latest example – on my main Gmail account I had a document that I wanted to copy as text – in Internet Explorer, so I could put it into my notepad and try printing it.
I wanted to do it through the menu first rather than with a keyboard shortcut, because I do not trust that in Internet Explorer, on Google sites, keyboard shortcuts would work. It is a .docx document, i.e. Microsoft Word. But the Select All item was grayed out, and so was Copy. So I shared the file and pasted it into Opera 15, which runs on the Chrome 28 engine, but same thing.
All I found out was that at Google I was shown as the signed-in user “Anonymous Aurochs“. So I wondered whether Google was only catering to its own browser and tried it in Chrome as well. Nothing. And yet in classic Google Docs you could normally (even in IE using keyboard shortcuts) select the entire content and also copy it to the clipboard.
So now I am torn, given that I always have to be changing something and cannot stick with 1 thing for, say, several years. Earlier I had all my documents in Google Docs/Drive (GD) in the native GD format, because back then I did not have Microsoft Office yet, but then I downloaded them in MS Office formats, deleted the native Google Docs from GD and uploaded them to GD using Google Drive for Windows.
Either upload it all to Google Drive again (but in that case I would upload it to my secondary Google account, which I use in Chrome and Opera) – that is, without the PDFs, which cannot be edited in Google, and without spreadsheets, presentations, etc.; I would back all of that up to “nearby” storage. But I would also have to get used to writing my notes in Google Drive again, because right now I write them in Notepad, Word or OneNote.
Well, I would not have to, and certainly not all of them (I am keeping OneNote), but it would be nice. I also considered a combination of Office Web Apps + Office, but that would not be quite right either. So either leave everything as it has been so far, or download it and upload it as Google Docs, or keep everything on my own drive and open it in Word 2013.
And given how badly longer files edit in Google, and I do have a few of those longer files, the way I see it I will keep everything on my own drive and back it up to a NAS.