Google's free online office suite—Docs, Sheets, and Slides—isn't what it used to be, and that's a good thing. The search giant has transformed its productivity apps into a toolkit that retains old features while adding many for documents designed to be used online, with tools that don't exist for paper-style or single-author documents. The suite accomplishes some things brilliantly—for example, its revision history can show every change you or your collaborators ever made—but falls short in other areas. Crucially, it's not easy to use offline, and it has trouble with large documents that Microsoft 365—our Editors' Choice award winner for suites—handles effortlessly. Still, it's an excellent if slightly eccentric set of tools for collaboration, and you can't beat the price of admission.

The name many people use for the suite, Google Docs, is strictly speaking just the word processor, with Sheets for spreadsheets and Slides for presentations. Many businesses and colleges that don't want to pay for Microsoft's corporate offerings subscribe instead to Google's paid upgrade, Google Workspace. The latter offers auditing, security, and collaboration features, as well as advanced items like an AI assistant that will probably migrate into the free version at some time, though I can't say whether or when. I'll mention a few other Workspace-only features in the course of this review.

New Features in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides

On the positive side of the ledger, Google has added new online-only features that let you insert an active link to another document, insert email addresses from a list of your Google contacts, or create a voting chip that lets you and your collaborators express a view on a question by choosing between a heart or thumbs-down emoji. You can also create color-coded drop-down lists or insert a timer or stopwatch. 

An especially convenient feature lets you draft an email in Google Docs, using its editing and formatting tools, then click a button that makes the message appear in your Gmail draft folder, ready for sending. (I'll address some potential problems with this shortcut later.) You can now draft Google Calendar events in a similar way.

And, for creating true online-only documents, you can now choose between a traditional page-based format or a pageless format with no page breaks that accommodates tables and illustrations as wide as you want. Google has finally found a way to turn its online origins into an advantage over its hard-copy-focused rivals.

As mentioned, the paid Google Workspace suite now includes AI assistant Gemini, as a rival to Microsoft's emerging Copilot. It isn't yet part of Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

When It Comes to Design, Minimalism Reigns

Google has a long tradition of minimalism in its apps and websites, but the former have been growing more complex as their menus get longer and their options more numerous. Still, the Google apps are spare compared to desktop suites like Microsoft 365 (nee Office), LibreOffice, SoftMaker Office, and Corel WordPerfect, so you won't need to search very far to find the features you're looking for. The only desktop suite that's comparably modest in its feature set is the freeware OnlyOffice. If you need help, there's a search button at the left end of the toolbar that finds any feature for you, like that at the top of Microsoft's apps.

Depending on the way you prefer to collaborate with other users, you may find Google outshines the competition in its collaboration and revision-tracking features. Unlike other office suites, Google's trio has a built-in feature that lets you view your full edit history in the same window with the document itself. Simply click on the clock icon at top right, and you can scroll through every change made by you and your collaborators, copying long-deleted text and pasting it into the current version.

Google makes this feature manageable by using an outline-style display of versions, with minor changes hidden until you click a drop-down arrow. You can give names to any previous version, restore it, or save it as a copy. Microsoft gives you similar functionality if you save your documents to a OneDrive or SharePoint server, but many users, including me, prefer to avoid OneDrive.

Google's version history is elegantly implemented, but lacks some equally useful options that you get in Microsoft 365 and its workalikes. For example, Microsoft Word lets you switch on a Track Changes mode that either hides or displays all your (and your collaborators') revisions at the same time, without scrolling through a history of revisions. Google offers a similar feature in a mode that treats edits as "suggestions," but it clutters the editing screen with color-coded boxes and is arguably more trouble than it's worth.

The free apps have almost all the features you'll find in their paid Google Workspace counterparts, which are now open to everyone with a Google account at prices starting at $6 per user per month. One major difference between the versions is that the free version doesn't let you create document templates easily, while the paid version lets you build and upload templates with a couple of clicks. 

Streamlined Interface, Limited Features

Google Docs is ideal for brief reports, student essays, personal diaries, and other uncomplicated tasks, though it adds new advanced features every few months. Compared with other suites, Google's free tools rank last in power for creating traditional documents but first in ease of use for straightforward editing tasks. The suite's online-only nature plays into that simplicity; Google wants you to relax and trust that your data is safely and reliably accessible in the cloud. In fact, by making it difficult to work offline, Google is not-so-subtly encouraging you to not even bother with the local functionality.

The apps have a clean Interface with modern-looking typography and a sparsely populated top-line menu, which you can hide entirely if you like. The toolbar has clear icons. The design is exceptionally straightforward and well-thought-out, with simplicity and clarity rivaled only by Apple's Pages. The mobile versions of the apps offer a dark mode, but you'll need to install a third-party add-on to get the same feature for the web apps.

If you can't find something on 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 without returning to Help, an annoying oversight that Google shares with Microsoft 365.

Several shortcuts add to the apps' online focus. To insert a drop-down or draft an email message, you needn't find those features on a menu: Simply type an @ sign into a document in order to bring up a menu that lets you insert almost anything that's part of the Google universe, from contacts to files. 

Google keeps adding features that fix shortcomings of earlier versions. For example, Google Docs' Word Count dialog has an option to display a word count as you type, so you don't need to use the menu or a hotkey to see the current count. Its documents also keep getting more deeply embedded in the Google universe. For example, you can present directly to a Google Meet videoconference from a Docs, Sheets, or Slides window, or join a meeting simply by clicking on a video camera icon on the toolbar.

The underlying format for documents is the standard web-based HTML, but with a myriad of complex features added on. A View Source item on the menu shows you the complex underlying code that Google uses for even the simplest document. It's rather like visiting a sausage factory; you probably don't want to see all the ugly, incomprehensible bits and pieces that go into a Google Docs memo.

What Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides Can't Do

You get what you pay for, and Google's freeware apps (like Apple's free iWork suite) have many shortcomings that you won't find in their more costly counterparts. For example, Google Docs supports footnotes but not endnotes. It lets you insert and resize images, but doesn't make it easy to change their position on a page. If you use page numbering, you can prevent the number from appearing on the first page, but you can't otherwise use different headers and footers for one section of a document. You can modify the limited set of built-in paragraph styles, but can't create styles with custom names or that apply to a block of text smaller than a paragraph. 

Worse, large documents bring Google Docs and Google Sheets to their knees. I tried to upload a 2,000-page Word file—all text, no images—and after 10 minutes spent staring at a progress bar clicked Cancel and gave up. By contrast, the online version of Microsoft 365, running in the same Chrome browser, uploaded the file instantly and opened it for editing a few seconds later. Apple's online Pages also uploaded the file instantly, but took about 20 seconds to open it for work.

I tried to get the Word file into Google Docs by uploading it first to Google Drive, but the latter reported that the upload failed—which was at least more informative than the dialog box from Google Docs that never closed until I clicked Cancel.

The problem seems to be related to the number of pages, because I was able to upload and open a Word file that was much larger in size but had only a few hundred pages. Also, Google Docs is painfully slow with large files: When I uploaded a 350-page Word document and tried to search for a word, Google's Find and Replace dialog wouldn't even let me type in the search string for 20 seconds while the app was busy formatting the file in the background.

Finally, some Google conveniences can be downright awkward. For example, the Email menu has two confusingly similar menu items that do entirely different things: If you choose Email This File, a dialog box opens that lets you e-mail the document as you'd expect. But if you choose Email Draft, a table gets inserted into your document where you can type address and subject fields and draft an e-mail message, then click an M icon to send your message in Gmail.

If you're working on another document, you may not want this table added to your document, and nonexpert users may have a hard time getting it out again. Probably Google should have set up this feature so that it asks whether you want to create a new document for drafting an email or to create the draft in the current document, which you probably won't want to do.

What Google's Suite Does Right

Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides do some things very well. I like, for instance, the option to display a document in print layout but without the blank spaces at top and bottom of the page. You don't have to shift your vision down two inches when a sentence extends across a page break with this view. Among rival suites, only Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect have this feature. 

The recently added pageless option lets you create documents designed for online viewing only, somewhat like ordinary web pages. This option lets you add graphics that are wider than a printed page and changes the margins when you resize the window, but has the disadvantage of hiding features such as footnotes until you switch back to paged mode.

You can choose this option on the Format menu or the File > Page Setup menu, where you can select it for either the current document or as the default for all the documents you create. You can't use pageless mode in documents imported from Microsoft Word; even in documents created in Google Docs, the option to switch between page and pageless mode sometimes gets grayed out for obscure reasons. The only way to get it back is to make a copy of the document and use the copy instead of the original. 

One warning: when you save a pageless document to PDF, the resulting file has a standard page size, with the result that any document with wide tables or large images gets shrunk to fit the page. It's technically possible to create a PDF with a large enough page size to fit the document, but Google Docs doesn't do this.

Google's document templates are elegantly designed and easy to use, but there's no simple way to create a template with the free versions of the apps. You can find complicated workarounds online, but if you want to make your own templates, you're better off with Google Workspace or one of the other suites.

I'm puzzled by one oddity in the way Google exports documents to PDF format: Every other program I've used that exports PDFs adds the file creation date to the PDF's metadata so the date of the file gets baked into it. Google's exported PDFs have no date information at all. This information can be crucial if you're trying to follow an audit trail of documents, so I can't imagine why Google leaves it out.

Audited Spreadsheets and Proficient Presentations

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 in a worksheet. As with its suitemates, you can view all changes to a document in chronological sequence. Sheets goes one step further with a feature that lets you view the editing history of individual cells. 

Google Workspace, true to its corporate-level purposes, now lets you edit most encrypted Excel XLSX spreadsheets if you know the password, but the freeware Google Sheets doesn't (yet) have the feature. The Workspace version also supports larger worksheets than the free one.

Google has added a recorded macro feature to Sheets, but not to Docs. That said, if you know how to program your own macros, an Apps Script editor available in Docs, Sheets, and Slides lets you create automated scripts that optionally link to Google's APIs. You can, for example, write a script to manage YouTube uploads from a Sheets worksheet.

The Google Slides presentation app is surprisingly speedy and elegant. It offers almost all of the dazzling effects built into Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple's Keynote. You don't get advanced editing features like sliders that can trim a video, but you'll find sharp-looking templates and conveniences such as a Q&A history you can consult when you need to remember an answer you gave weeks ago.

Offline Woes

The real disadvantage of Google's apps, in both their free and paid form, is the lack of desktop programs that work offline. Competitors such as LibreOffice and Apple iWork, both free, also offer desktop apps (the former on all desktop platforms and the latter on macOS only). Microsoft 365, the suite that gives you the best of both online and desktop worlds, starts at $69.99 per year for one person with 1TB of cloud storage. It's hard to say it's not worth the money. 

You shouldn't make the mistake of assuming your internet access will never be interrupted or that Wi-Fi won't quit working halfway through a cross-country flight. If you don't prepare ahead for online access to your files, you won't be able to read them, much less edit them, when your computer is offline.

To prepare to edit Docs, Sheets, or Slides files offline, you must first to 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 on every document you want to edit offline, and then 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—when you're offline, you'll be able to click on documents in your Google Drive folder on your desktop and edit them in Chrome. If you don't see the Available Offline option, you're probably working for an organization that disables offline access for its employees, as one of the companies I work for has. In that situation, I got offline access to files in my corporate accounts by sharing them with my personal account.

All of this is ridiculously complex and reminds me what a good value Microsoft 365 is. Unlike Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, and other online syncing services, Google doesn't give you the option of storing all of your Google Drive files on your local machine by default, which would let you avoid these annoyances.

Sleek, Limited Mobile Apps

The mobile versions of Google's office apps look terrific, but offer only a small subset of the browser versions' features. Basically, you can use the mobile versions to edit the text and change the formatting of a document or worksheet, but not much else. You can't, for instance, auto-sum cells with the iPhone Sheets app.

Microsoft's mobile apps pack a lot more features; the mobile version of Excel has far greater capabilities. Apple's mobile Numbers app is more sophisticated, too—it offers automated suggestions when you start typing a formula.

Effective, Elegant, Easy to Use

Nevertheless, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides are free, effective, available anywhere via a browser or mobile device, and refreshingly easy to use. They stumble over offline work and large files, and their version-history feature may not give you the level of convenience that users of Microsoft's Track Changes are used to.

Anyone who needs the features lacking in Google's trio, or who just wants power in reserve, will prefer either our Editors' Choice honoree Microsoft 365 (or Apple iWork for macOS buffs). Still, we urge you to at least try Google's apps so you'll be ready if a coworker shares a Google document, presentation, or worksheet with you. You might just decide that their convenience and compact feature set suit your everyday needs as well.