Google Docs: Not its brightest moment (or mine) on my desktop

So I'm working on a not-so-complicated (but not plain text) document that began its life some time ago in Microsoft Word, which means it's a .doc file that got uploaded to Google Docs.

It sort of, kind of looked OK in Google Docs, except that in a few places I couldn't get the fonts and the margins right.

And outputting the Google Docs document back into .doc or .odt (OpenDocument) was a real mess, with a mix of Web styles, Word styles, strange margins, etc.

After getting nowhere fast in Google Docs, I finally tried to remove all formatting and start over. But I couldn't even get the line spacing right.

I'm sure a little CSS hackery could have made things right, but I'm not in any mode to do that.

So I exported the document in .odt format and worked on it in OpenOffice Writer. Now I can save it as an HTML, MS Word or RTF document, or better yet export it as a PDF.

I love having Google Docs enable me to work on things anywhere, at any time, but I've found that the cloud-based app works best when documents originate in Google Docs and stay there. Converting them to .odt, RTF and .doc format causes the formatting to break down.

I've blogged in the past about how poorly Google Docs offline with Gears worked for me.

So at this point, what would work better for my situation would be cloud-based files accessed by apps on my local client.

And I'd like to see the ability to access networked files in the cloud be available from every application, meaning the feature would be integrated in the operating system or desktop environment and not be part of a single application.

Just a thought. I'll feel better about Google Docs later this week when I get back to what I mostly use it for. I'm dropping code and documentation into it all the time and sharing those files with my co-workers. That's one thing that Google Docs does better than anything else I've seen.

And I will try to create a heavily formatted document in Docs. I just wish it could be the SAME document shared between Docs and OpenOffice. Maybe a Docs-formatted document would play more nicely in OO than a Word-formatted document turned into a Docs document, then an OO document.