Google Goofs Google Docs

There’s nothing I hate more than when a company “improves” their product to only make it dumber and less friendly than it was before the improvement.  Today’s case-in-point are The Google — who decided to goof with how a Google Docs file is saved and then released from view.

To best understand the Google goofing, we need to travel back in time a few months. 

When I first started using Google Docs inside my Boles University Google Apps account, any work you did in Docs took over your browser.  If you opened lots of files, your browser Tabs quickly became overwhelming.

To solve that “Google Docs Tabs Invasion” — Google did the right, smart, thing, and added a Settings option that let you open a Doc “In the current window” — which meant your main Google Docs view of files would be replaced with the file you were opening.

That was a fantastic, helpful, change:

When you were finished working on your Google Doc, you would click a
“Save and Close” button that would save your file and then “close” that
file you were working on and you would then be returned to your main
Google Docs view IN THE SAME BROWSER WINDOW TAB so you could label your
new Doc or open or save another one. 

It was all a magical editorial process — that is… until this week — when The Google made the incredibly odd Goof of REMOVING the necessary “Save and Close” button from your Docs interface.

Here’s the only “Save” option you have now.  You can click on the “Save now” button to actively save your file, or…

…you can just wait it out and let Google Docs auto-save it for you as the “Save Now” button ghosts out to become a goofy, “Saved” status:

The reason this is Such A Big Goof is that this new Save Scheme completely undermines the previously beloved “In the current window” Settings option.

Now you have no way of “Saving and Closing” your current document and
automatically returning to your default Google Docs view in the same
browser window Tab. 

Your only choice is to manually close the
browser window Tab — which then completely closes Google Docs — and if
you want to continue working, you have to RE-open Google Docs again to
get your default list of files.

What sort of improvement is that
when unnecessary extra steps are added to extend your work time?

NONE WHATSOEVER! 

Google Fail.

Google Bad.

Google Goof.

Let’s hope Google will quickly see the error of
their new “Save” button ways and restore the “Save and Close” button for
those of us who use Google Docs all day long and who really resent the
notion that The Google knows the best way for us to work online by
making Google Docs worse than better.