Will it do most everything you need it to do? Probably.
What do most people use Word for? Writing letters, drafting emails and other documents. All of the myriad of features that you find in Word are mostly there for power users. It has way more features than I have learned to use and I have done some fairly complicated things with it.
Over the years I have laid out books, dissertations, and all kinds of PR materials using Word, but the vast majority of my work is nothing more than simple documents that I save to my hard drive or cut and paste into a website.
I have used Word in numerous office settings, from a newspaper to non-profits, to work with the state community college system, and back to the church. What I discovered in all of these settings is that for most of the employees, we collectively used less than half of the features that come with Word (and less than 1/3 of the tools that come with Microsoft Office).
Some questions that people ask of Google Docs:
Is it compatible with Word?
In short-Yes. At the community college I was told that I could not use any other Word processing program, because it would not be compatible with the hardware on the campus network. That just became a challenge and I frequently used Google Docs and iPages with my Mac to test the edges. As far as I know, no one ever found out or cared what I was using. You can export any Google Doc into Word, and back the other way. Are there occasional issues. Sure. But I have not found them to be formidable.
Can you insert images, tables, footnotes, etc. in Docs?
No problem. The insert interface is easy and manageable. Give it a test. Inserting a footnote may actually be easier in Docs than Word.
I have never found issues. You have many of the standard fonts, plus a host of others. You have all of the sizing capabilities an can even format text for web documents easily. If you need to use other languages, there are some options that you can set-up in your account to do that.
Does it have easy to use templates?
It has a bunch of them available in the basic program. You can run a search, and there are hundreds of them online for various projects. Most all of them are customizable. Not sure that you will need more than what is available.
Can you use it offline?
Yes. It is completely possible to use Google Docs without an internet connection. I will devote an entire article to that question at a later date
What are the drawbacks to Google Docs?
I am finding fewer every day I experiment. If you are already a power user of MS Office, you will probably not want to switch. For the money, Google Docs can hardly be beat as a word processor.
Summary: If I were to start a business, I would recommend that only folks who needed the extra features get computers that run Office, the rest of us would use the Chromebook with its own suite of tools. Docs being the most used of the bunch. We would save money upfront, and we would already have networking tools available too us thanks to Google.
