Google Docs Gets Templates
For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, Google Docs now has a large directory of templates for Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations. I think this is an excellent idea for them because it gives non-technical users who aren’t otherwise interested in using an online office suite an incentive to do so. They’ve also opened it up so that others can contribute, which means free content for them, and a level of sharing templates that hasn’t quite been achieved yet by any office suite. They’ve already taken advantage of it’s ease-of-use to partner with Avery and have mailing label templates available in the directory.
I think Spreadsheets template directory holds a lot of promise for great innovations, since you can include a lot of functionality in a spreadsheet, especially with the extensibility Google has already provided it’s spreadsheets.
I do wonder about one thing about though: The documents directory contains a lot of résumé templates; would Google be impressed if you applied to them with one of their own templates? They promote them quite elegantly in the descriptions, and they are certainly very attractive résumés, but sometimes just using a template can come off as lazy. Not to mention that if everyone uses them, they lose any quality they had of being eye-catching and memorable.