It's true that the average user uses maybe 20% of Word's features, and Google Docs have 50% of them. The problem is that each person uses a different 20%.

One feature I personally needed and missed was to generate a table of contents with page numbers for each heading. I ended up exporting the doc to Word to do it, and in the process discovered that the exported document had a messed up layout in a few places.

Yeah this is a super common experience among people I talk to. For me, it was not wanting any headers or page numbers on my title page. (I ended up making two separate documents to get around it)

would like to report that I just used google docs the other day for something where I also needed a title page, and that google now supports this

Google Docs isn't even in the same league as MS Office. GDocs is basically slow, web-running (I mean that as an insult), glorified Markdown editor that saves your data in an unknown format somewhere you can't access directly.

About the "features average person needs" remember that users adapt their workflows to the featuers you give them and make do, not the other way around. Give them more, they'll use more.

If somebody out there has a reliable way to measure resource consumption in Windows (Mark Russinovich?), I'd be interested in a comparison between (say) a thousand word document in Word and the same document in Google Docs in Chrome.

I think you could probably add "resource hungry" to your description of GDocs....

That's probably the case, but does it matter?

Ask the people who spent years attacking Word for being "bloatware" ;-)

It chops off a solid 30-45 minutes of battery life on my laptop, in Safari (to say nothing of Chrome, at which point it becomes a campfire on my lap), so yeah, I think so.

In my experience, Docs can't even reliably align the cursor with the position between characters (problem described here[1], except my zoom is at 100% already).

Thankfully all my documents have very light formatting, so I can just write in Vim and then upload them.

[1] http://www.podiohelp.com/google-docs-cursor-misaligned/

I get this as well, and I have another problem. I usually work in Word but one company wants things in Google Docs. OK, I create the document in Word in Times Roman and paste it into Google Docs.... which converts it into Arial.

If I copy something else from the same Word document into the same Google Doc, then Google keeps it in Times. How does that work?

Is there a "smart paste" feature I've missed?

Sorry if I'm being thick, but I'm using the same clipboard to paste between the same two documents, so I still don't see why GDocs should interpret them differently....

I can try clearing the clipboard between pastes: would that make a difference?

I've seen this happen before, but only very rarely and refreshing would always fix it. Does refreshing not work for you?

Unfortunately not.

Any sort of styling control: if there's a particular style I want applied to certain portions, I have to recreate it at each use. God help me if I decide to change it halfway through the document.

Orphaning of content: GDocs will very happily strand a section header at the bottom of a page, dropping a page break right between the header and the content.

The cursor will occasionally just go where it pleases.

Revision history (compared to diffing git commits) is incredibly frustrating. Click on a revision, read the whole doc, repeat…

As a sibling says,

> Oh and typography.

Tables and images positioning to begin with. Text flow around objects as well. Oh and typography.

I think you missed the word "online". https://office.live.com/start/Word.aspx