This afternoon I spent two hours brainstorming for World War Cthulhu with my wife and making notes with Google Docs in the Microsoft Word document on my iPad. I deliberately closed the document every time I paused to sync it to Google Drive. A few hours later, I opened the document on my iPhone, started editing, and then realized that it was not the current version. However, as soon as I closed the document, it uploaded to Google Drive and overwrote all the work I had done this afternoon. This is not the first time this has happened. Google Docs knows to upload on saving. Why can’t it download before opening? There are no settings for Google Docs.
Last week, Google Drive seemed to forget that Google Docs was even installed. I would go to Google Docs and select to open a document. Google Drive would open the document in read only mode, and when I clicked the edit icon, it told me to install Google Docs. I reported the issue to Google, and the next day, it suddenly worked again. This happened again once today as well.
Ever since Google bought Quickoffice and broke it, there has not been a good document editor for IOS. At least none where you can open a document that has been edited in one app and not lost all the formatting. I tried opening Google Docs edits files in Documents to Go, and all I got was plain text. I also tried opening Documents to Go edits files in Google Docs with the same result. What’s the point of using a standard document format, when you can’t go from one app to another?
I’m going to go back now and try to remember what we came up with this afternoon.
Update
So now I have recovered what I lost the other day, and the wifi has stopped working. So I want to make a copy of the document, so that if the sync problems happen again, I won’t lose my work. Except that Google Docs won’t make a copy unless there is access to the Internet.