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So, I'm trying to figure out how we are going to handle the editing for Buzzerfest, and while Google Docs worked decently last year, the whole thing with it not preserving some formatting, or margins, etc. from a Word document is kind of annoying. Are there any alternatives that people know of that are free and preserve formatting from Word?

olsb25 wrote:So, I'm trying to figure out how we are going to handle the editing for Buzzerfest, and while Google Docs worked decently last year, the whole thing with it not preserving some formatting, or margins, etc. from a Word document is kind of annoying. Are there any alternatives that people know of that are free and preserve formatting from Word?

There's a very easy way to fix all the formatting issues. First, highlight everything, and go to Format -> Paragraph and set the "Before" and "After" spacing to 0pt. Then, highlight everything and set it to Times New Roman, 10 point font. Viola.

That stuff is indeed minor... but it would be nice if there were something that, for example, preserved the margins so 6 lines in Word is actually 6 lines online. Also, sometimes underlining or italics or bolding is lost, which is a real pain when downloading and having to go through and redo all that. If such an alternative does not exist, then we'll just go with Google, I was just wondering if anyone knew of one.

olsb25 wrote:That stuff is indeed minor... but it would be nice if there were something that, for example, preserved the margins so 6 lines in Word is actually 6 lines online. Also, sometimes underlining or italics or bolding is lost, which is a real pain when downloading and having to go through and redo all that. If such an alternative does not exist, then we'll just go with Google, I was just wondering if anyone knew of one.

I've never lost italics or underlining when transferring from google docs. The margins in google docs are an issue, but if you remember to write shorter its not a big deal.

I do not know of any alternatives to Google docs that do the same thing, but I can tell you that reformatting something from Google docs never took me more than 30 seconds, even using the dreaded OpenOffice. I mean, if you're experiencing serious troubles, you are probably doing something very incorrect. The easiest thing to do is to go to Format -> Clear All Formatting or whatever that option is in Word and just re-bold and re-underline everything. A little tedious, but I've honestly never had to worry about this; I would just do what Eric is saying.

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:There's a very easy way to fix all the formatting issues. First, highlight everything, and go to Format -> Paragraph and set the "Before" and "After" spacing to 0pt. Then, highlight everything and set it to Times New Roman, 10 point font. Viola.

HIYO!

Have you tried dropbox? I haven't used it much but I believe it does what you want.

Arquette wrote:Have you tried dropbox? I haven't used it much but I believe it does what you want.

I think this will do quite nicely... thanks for the heads up.

http://docs.zoho.com/jsp/index.jsp

It's pretty cool. I used to write a couple of packets in March/April, but kind of forgot about it until you made this thread. I liked using Zoho Docs.

The one thing you have to remember is that the formatting will work out best if you write all your questions in google docs instead of cut/pasting your questions into google docs after writing them in word. Basically, all the extra tags word inserts can cause the formatting to get garbled up, so it's best to avoid writing questions in Word.

All the other paragraph stuff can be easily fixed once the packet is downloaded onto Word.

Word seems to be the issue here, not Google docs. Why bother with it at all? (Google Docs works offline, now.)

In the past, version control software has worked well for me.