A Complaint About Docs

If you are a fan of Android and have spent any time online in the last few years, chances are you've heard about Google Docs, the always-in-the-cloud office documents system.  I've been using this innovative new system to write a couple of new projects, and to collaborate with some of my co-conspirators.  And overall, I'm pleased with how it works. Especially the autosave feature.

But I have been using Docs mostly on my Android tablet, and I hit a snag today.  I was stuck out in an area where wifi was not freely available, and in some spots not available at all.  So I figured I would give Google Docs offline feature a try. So, in the Docs app, I loaded up a new document, gave it a silly title like I usually do, and hit the create button.  Error code.  Tried again, error code.  I tried as many different settings as possible, and still error code.

It seems you cannot create a new document in offline mode, which seriously diminishes the usefulness of Google Docs.  Just being able to edit already written documents in offline mode isn't very useful, as many times if you are going to use the offline function at all it will be to start a new document.  And I find it sad that even the Blogger mobile app will let you create a new blog post with out a connection to the internet, but an office suite won't.  Google needs to fix this, and fix this fast if they are serious about moving the modern office to the cloud.