Google Docs for copywriters: A quick tutorial

It’s Kate Toon here, Head Copy Beast at the Clever Copywriting School.

I just wanted to do a little video today about Google Docs. Now many of you will have used Google Docs already and probably know how it works, but yesterday I discovered how to track changes and I was pretty chuffed to find this.

That’s what I’m going to talk about today, but also the pros and cons of using Word versus Google Docs, which is best when you’re sending draughts of copy to clients.

Let’s get stuck in and have a look at Google Docs.

You come in here, you’ve obviously already signed up, and you head into Google Docs. Google Docs is a Cloud based storage system so it enables you to store documents in the Cloud and anyone can access them from wherever they are, depending on the access that you give them.

I use it a lot for podcast episodes and also for other documents where I have several different people looking at them. I write them, I get them proofread by someone.

Then the guest needs to look at them, then my VA needs to grab them to take the content and put in a post.

So a really great spot to have everything in one place rather than emailing documents around.

Here’s a document that I recently did for a podcast. It looks just the same as Word and it has all the same functions along the top as Word as well, so you know you can do all the same things, formatting, got tools and spellchecker and all that kind of thing.

You just type away normally, type here.

Other things you can do is you can highlight content here and leave little comments like should we move this?

And then that comment will sit there, someone else can answer that comment, so if you click here you can edit that comment, delete it, you can also link to it, so you could refer to a specific comment.

Then, of course, once it’s all fixed up you can resolve it and the comment will disappear.

That’s one little function but the function that I found yesterday was track changes, because what’s been happening obviously is my proofreader has been making changes in the document but I haven’t been able to see them.

I’ve just had to trust them.

She’s been adding comments where it’s something that’s up for debate.

That means that later on I can come down through the document, I can see all the changes my proofreader has made, and I can choose either to accept the suggestion, reject the suggestion, or make a comment about the suggestion.

You may be watching this and thinking, “I’ve always known that Kate, are you some kind of crazy idiot?”

But hey, we all discover things everyday and I’m someone who’s far too busy, lazy, to ever watch tutorials on how to do things, so I kind of feel them out as I go along.

That is a really useful trick.

Of course with Google Docs you don’t have to press save, so everything you do is automatically being saved all the time. Of course once you’re done you can also come down into here and you can download the document if you do want to send it as a document.

You can publish it if you want to, you can email it to certain collaborators, so to clients, or as an attachment.

So something similar to this, it says this is version one, this is version two, so that I can go back and look at previous versions and say, “Well hey, you told me in version two to remove that paragraph so that’s why I did it.”

So versioning is helpful for that, to track the changes that you’ve made for a job.

You can give each version a name, you can call this version one, and then moving forwards you can then create second version and third version. Y

ou can actually go back in here and see the version history.

It will show you previous changes that you’ve made to your documents, and also, maybe you make multiple changes but you don’t want that to be a new version, you can actually go through and see the changes but then when you’re at certain points, certain milestones, you can create a clean new version.

The only issue is of course, that any new technology kind of makes your client a bit itchy. Most clients are used to Word, they use it every day.You might have to show them how to switch tracked changes on, but other than that they’re pretty good.

Something about Google Docs freaks people out, I think specifically the fact that you can’t save documents, that really worries people, but I think you just need to take them through these elements here and show them that yes, you can download the document if you want to have a saved version.

It is being saved all the time, you can create versions, you can track changes.

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