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GOOGLE DOCS USABILITY FAIL

First of all I would like to say that Google are one of my favourite folks and the services they provide are really great. I am especially a big fan of Google docs that has been a very useful tool for me in remote collaboration scenarios. However that will be the subject of this critic. To be honest I didn't use it for a while (a few months) until a few days ago. I decided to make a couple of presentations since I wanted to have them in the cloud. Most of the objects are images or graphical objects. Therefore after the file is placed I resize it with the mouse and use the arrow keys for positioning it where I want to. Actually I almost never use mouse even for rough positioning. From my experience with a number of tools (Wireframe tools and Adobe software) I use shift+arrow key to position roughly the image since while holding the shift key you move at larger steps. Then for fine positioning I use the arrow keys alone. By now you should be able to guess where this is going to :) YES you are right, Google Docs does it in exactly the opposite way.

Being a fan of Google I decided not to walk away and to submit a raport/complain. So earlier today I googled how to do it and there was a decent instruction basically pointing you to a settings button (gear wheel icon) in the browser. For some services it shows up like Calendar and Docs for others it doesn't (maybe they are perfect and don't need further feedback). However the pop-up menu for Calendar contains an entry for filing a bug report, while the one for Docs has no such entry. To make things even more confusing when filing a bug the first screen asks you to select the area in the browser where the bug is located, probably taking a screenshot and attaching it to the report. Thus the context of use when filing the report is forwarded which is a good idea in general but only when you are able to file a bug for the current context (e.g. Calendar). Since Docs obviously has no such support, I am honestly giving up. I've wasted enough time searching how to file a complaint and don't plan to go through hell in order to submit mine. So I'll have to live with it (sigh). At least this whole experience provided an interesting discussion topic and I hope you enjoyed it.

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