Google Docs

Google Docs

Google Docs is easy to use. You can use different formatting options, including the addition of photos, tables and links. One thing I wondered about was file size, so I checked the help file.

Documents

• Each document can be up to 500K, plus up to 2MB per embedded image.
• You can upload documents from any of the following file formats:
  • HTML
  • Plain text (.txt)
  • Microsoft Word
  • .rtf
  • Open Office (.odt)
• Each user has a limit of 5000 documents and 5000 images.
  

If a team was collaborating on a larger project, then the work would have to be broken down into smaller documents. Page breaks can be inserted as well as horizontal lines (separators). The ability to share files for revisions is a great asset. All revisions can be accessed. If a person uses more than one computer, I could see that it would be great to be able to access files created in Google Docs.

At present, I am not working on a project where I would use the ability to collaborate but it is good to know the capabilities of this tool. I particularly like that the work can be exported in a variety of file types. Many would find being able to export .pdf files also useful. Because this file can be posted to your blog, I could see me using it to be able to include tables.

Date YYYY-MM-DD	Event	Place	Source
1858-12-07	Birth of George X	West Field Guiting Power Glos.	Birth Registration
1859-01-02	Baptism of George X	Guiting Lower, Glos.	Parish Baptismal Register
1861-04-07	1861 Census	Condicote, Glos.	1861 census - http://www.ancestry.co.uk/

The above is an example of a table inserted in the document. By right-clicking in a cell you can make revisions to the table after it is inserted. I needed to add another column. The above is an example of a time line. This is one of the useful tools that I use when I am researching my own or other people's families. It helps identify errors and also alerts me to gaps in the research. The sources shown above are abbreviated. The actual documents would have full citations given. This chart could be expanded to include a document reference number. A future blog posting will talk further about using time lines in your research.

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This item was created in Google Docs