Hello everyone!
I think I killed Google Docs. Well, if it ain’t dead, it sure ain’t happy with me at any rate.
I’ve been having problems working on my current book for a while now. Google Docs began getting slower and slower, to the point where I would have to wait several minutes for my words to show up. The sad part is that I’m typing this sucker one-handed; it was taking longer for the words to show up on the screen then it was for me to type them!
Then it started crashing. Repeatedly.
After a lengthy battle I finally decided to download the file and start working on it offline using LibreOffice since I no longer own a computer that has Microsoft Office.
Google Docs would only allow me to download in RTF format and DOCX format. the RTF was, shall we say, imperfect? It was also over 100MB in size. The DOCX file refused to open due to an error. Simply copying and pasting left all my footnotes behind.
I still had a free account on Office Live from years ago so I used it to open the DOCX file.
It would only open read-only.
By this point I was ready to throw something out of a window. It was well past 2am, I wanted to work on my book, and nothing I tried worked. I called it a night. The next day I went in search of a buddy to happened to have a copy of Word.
We managed to get the DOCX file to open and converted to something usable. It isn’t perfect, but it is way better than what I had.
I’m leaving the book online for now in hopes that you can at least look through what’s there but I learned a valuable lesson: Google Docs does not handle large files well. Fellow writers, consider yourself warned.
Now I’m off to work on the book again. I will upload changes/new sections if I can. Sorry!
It’s frustrating how life keeps throwing us lessons we don’t want to have to learn!
Yeah, but I learned a lot from the experience. I don’t regret it for one moment, though for a bit there I was rather concerned. I would hit the “download” button on the book file and Google would just…do nothing. Literally, nothing. The website would spin like it was doing something but literally nothing would happen.
I fiddled and I fought until finally it let me download the DOCX and the RTF versions. Once I realized that I would have to completely reformat the RTF file, I started focusing on the DOCX version. I finally got it to work. It was imperfect in that I had to reformat every single footnote in the book but at least I’m able to write again.