Contact Google Docs Support

I use google docs to type up reports, nearly everyday. I type my notes on a variety of apple devices, and usually it works well enough. But occasionally it will pull up an old version of the document, sometimes a few weeks old, and it’ll delete all the previous weeks worth of notes I’ve written. Today I typed up my daily note on my ipad, all my notes were on there (I had used a MacBook Air earlier that week with no problem either). Afterwards I went onto an iPad mini to add to my note and it pulled up a version from over 2 weeks prior, showing none of my notes that I had recently written. I quickly pulled out my phone and checked the doc and it was the exact same on there, both completely sync’d up. I tried to check the history of the notes to see if I could see my deleted notes, but it didn’t have anything recent to show. The only was I was able to save my doc was by turning on airplane mode on my iPad and then opening the doc so that it wouldn’t update, and then turning the WiFi back on so it could make the others sync to it. This is extremely worrisome to use a service that is supposed to sync your notes across devices, but may actually delete all your data.

I love that google docs lets you share your document and work simultaneously with others. It’s very convenient in that regard. However if there were another option for that purpose, I’d probably switch over. There are so many things in google docs that make it way harder and more frustrating than it needs to be. You can’t put text over an image, it’s a million steps just to find where text boxes are located, you can’t paste something in from Microsoft Word without the formatting being destroyed, it’s hard to set a tab-stop that will stay there when you move on to a new line, there are cntrl shortcuts that work for other document creators but not for google docs, and it’s almost impossible to customize a document to look different or engaging if you’re trying to make a handout. I could go on. I’m in my early 20s so it’s not like I’m just tech-incompetent—google docs is just needlessly frustrating to use. It’s all made more frustrating by the fact that google is such a huge company; they have the resources to make docs better but for some reason they don’t.

You know how we all rely on google for turning in class assignments? Well... IT DID ME WRONG AT THE WORST POSSIBLE MOMENT!!! I take AP World History and had something due today and couldn’t get on it until this weekend but this week it was updated for a big fix that has going on for weeks now that is still going on!!! The app crashes at random times whether it’s long or short periods of time, and this week it’s gotten worse to the point I can’t even see my cursor when I type on my phone anymore and whenever I try to exit out of the page to refresh, I suddenly see two icons of my own account that was recently on the doc and and still see the cursor I recently used on my doc. I was copying and pasting my work from one box onto another but suddenly no matter how many times I double tapped on my screen, I couldn’t paste, forcing me to restart my phone and try again and once I got back on my doc, I realized I never pasted my paragraph back on the doc and now my work is lost until I can get on a computer tomorrow and search my version history and revive my lost work!! Sad to say, google can’t be relied on for everything especially when it’s been having a problem that gone unnoticed and unsolved for over 2 months now.