Working as an editor for an online publication a few years back, I remember receiving a draft of a story from a freelancer submitted as a PDF. “A PDF?” I asked aloud incredulously. Microsoft Word documents, Google docs, or even plain text files were the types of digital currency I normally dealt with. “How am I supposed to edit a PDF?” I could have just asked the freelancer to resend the file in a different format, but instead I used my extensive background as a technology reporter to Google “PDF to .doc converters,” change the file type, and commence my work on the piece. The whole ordeal couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes, but the hassle made a lasting imprint on my memory. In an era where we can send a Tesla into space, my workflow shouldn’t hit a roadblock just because of a stupid file type.
Nowadays, that sort of predicament is a thing of the past—at least if you’re a Google Drive user. The search giant has been waging a quiet war against your document-editing workflow. Or perhaps more accurately, Google’s been democratizing it. In the days of yore, if you wanted to open a Microsoft Word document, you needed Microsoft Word. For a PDF, a PDF reader like Adobe Acrobat. Plain text docs and rich text docs would show up questionably formatted, depending on the program you opened them with. And then there were open document types, the digital equivalent of filing a grade-school essay in purple ink. While document-editing apps have been vying for your downloads, Google has been making it easier and easier to open and edit documents of any type without the need for any sort of separate program.
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