The Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. Photo: AFP/Kimihiro Hoshino
While Apple has been unveiling its latest products, Google has also been hard at work on improving the accessibility and user-friendliness of its
Google Drive suite of documents. Its three most popular applications -- word processing, spreadsheets and graphical presentations -- were renamed ‘docs', ‘sheets' and ‘slides' on Tuesday and are now available as apps in the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, they will automatically appear as shortcuts each time a user launches the Chrome browser or opens a new browsing tab. For Chromebook users, these apps will also appear automatically in their apps list once the next Chrome OS upgrade is released in mid-November.
Google Drive is one of several concerted efforts from Google to move people away from their physical desktops and physical software with physical licensing agreements and into the virtual world of the cloud. Google Drive already contains over 30 types of document or application, including Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, which can be used online, even if the software is not installed on the computer. It is compatible with any type of computer or mobile device that has an internet connection and the first 5GB of storage is free.