Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am tickety-boo; thanks for asking.
Today on DottoTech we have an exciting show because we are going to be taking a look at
Dropbox Paper, which sort of goes head to head with Google Drive but not really, and
it even sort of competes with Evernote but not really, and to a certain extent it even
competes with Slack but not really.
Dropbox Paper is its own unique collaboration service specifically designed by Dropbox for
Dropbox users and you and I benefit.
So today, we’re taking a look at what I think is actually a pretty darn good tool
– Dropbox Paper on DottoTech.
Collaboration tools are wonderful.
They just make us work better.
And there are lots of different choices out there for collaboration tools and frankly
any time I look at any productivity app at all, I'm looking for how well it works in
a collaborative environment.
I work with a virtual team.
Many of us do.
And even those of us that don’t necessarily always work with a virtual team, we’re often
working on the same documents and the same projects with a team so we need tools that
allow us to collaborate and work more effectively.
Now we’ve looked in the past at Evernote and using it for collaboration and it’s
a great tool for collaboration.
We’ve looked at Google Drive which is all about collaboration.
But most of us are already using Dropbox in collaboration in some way or another because
of the great file sharing functionality that Dropbox has and the convenience that it provides.
Well, Dropbox is stepping up their game by giving us now a true collaboration tool called
Paper which really allows us to collaborate on documents.
It’s not as full-featured as what we see in Google Drive with spreadsheets and all
of those other types of documents.
Dropbox Paper at least in the beginning is really only for kind of Word type documents
or word processing type documents but they have their own unique spin and I think they’ve
done a pretty fine job.
What say you and I take a look?
Now one thing that I need to get out of the way right away is you have to sign into Dropbox
Paper at the Dropbox Paper page.
So you go to their website, Dropbox Paper.
You sign in with your Dropbox account.
You don’t see anything, any reference to Dropbox Paper in your regular Dropbox account.
If we take a look here, if I do the dropdown menu of my Dropbox account and just open the
folder, you can see that there’s no reference here to Dropbox Paper in any way.
As a matter of fact, you don’t actually see any of your Dropbox Paper files in Dropbox,
at least currently.
They say on their FAQs that at some point, that functionality may be added but right
now even though it uses your Dropbox account¸ it’s a discrete service within Dropbox and
it doesn’t count against your Dropbox storage, which is really nice.
So when you sign in, you’re going to be brought into the page that looks like this.
You sign in with your Dropbox account, as I say, and they’ve got some nice sample
documents here that will walk you through how it all works.
So spend some time and go through the different kind of formats that they have set up here
for you, but I’ll just dive in right now and show you how we’ve started to use it
ourselves here on DottoTech and it will give you a really good idea of how it works.
So I've created a folder for our blog posts so that Jen and I can share blog posts.
As you can see, we’ve just started with it but it’s got some really nice collaborative
features.
And that’s what this is all about.
It’s all about collaboration.
So when you start a new document or you open an existing document, you’re brought into
a very much word processor type environment except that each of your text areas is kind
of its own distinct block.
Any time you hit a Return, you’ve got almost a discrete element that you have because by
hitting on the plus sign here at any point, you can add new content.
That’s how you go about adding content.
You can add content within a block that’s already in place or a snippet, I guess we
could call it, that’s already in place by just going in and typing within it.
That adds text.
And if you hit Return, it will create another block of text but you see the plus sign is
there, meaning that it doesn’t necessarily just have to be text.
If we click on that, we can see at this point here we can incorporate an image that we can
upload, we can insert a file from Dropbox if we’re working that way, we can insert
a table, a bullet list, a task list which is really interesting as we move along, you
can insert a divider and you can could also insert code.
If you’re a code writer, this is a great tool for writing code and it actually parses
out the code for you quite nicely.
We’re not going to do that so don’t worry right now.
But instead let’s just take a look at say adding a to-do list, a task list which I love
this functionality.
So if I at this point here while I'm editing this story, let’s say that maybe Jen has
written this story, I am now in editing mode in this story and I say you know what I need
Jen to do is I need to do say, and I can put in, I can even assign it to here by putting
an @ sign and anybody on your team you can just identify to them.
She will now get notice because I've set it up so that she’s shared in this particular
document and we do the sharing under the Share menu up here at the top where you adjust who
the document is shared with.
I can now assign this to her and say, “Jen, please check the facts on this” or something
similar.
And now she has an assignment.
So she’ll actually be notified that she has a task.
Once she does the task, she can check it off and I can see it’s checked off.
And just like in any kind of collaborative editing document, all of these kind of notes
will be stripped out later on when we go to actually publish this document, depending
on what form we’re going to publish it in.
Not only do we have the ability within the document to create these sorts of notes and
these tasks but we can also at any point by going here in the right-hand side, we can
add little comments.
I can say, “I love this but we need a graphic.”
And if I want to kind of soften the blow, I can use an emoji, the ever popular skipping
wizard.
I have no idea why he’d want to do that, a wizard doing something—oh, he’s making
a rainbow.
There we go.
So anyway, you can add little extra comments as you’re going, as you’re working through
and collaborating in the document.
It’s also got very powerful formatting features built into it.
By highlighting any piece of text, we get an immediate pop-up that allows us to format
it in a variety of different ways.
We can format it as bold text, strikethrough, etc.
We can insert a link if we choose.
We can add comments to it.
We can turn it into the task that we saw earlier but we can also, as I mentioned, create links.
Now adding a link adds a URL link to whatever we’re putting so let’s just put our website
address in here.
There we go and now we have a link in the document as well.
Now one thing that I really like about how Dropbox Paper works is all
of the formatting that we create in this web-based document seems to translate really nicely
through when I'm going into my WordPress site and when I'm actually posting blog posts.
So it’s reducing the amount of time we spend formatting as we migrate content over to WordPress
so that’s just kind of a nice little aside.
The bottom line is we can go through and you can edit all of the different elements within
it.
You can add new text, new graphics.
If you click on any of the graphic elements, you have the ability to do basic formatting
with that graphic.
So I can make this, instead of being outside of the text, I can make it float to the left
or I can make it float to the right with the text wrapping around it if I choose to or
kind of set it up, and all those sorts of ways.
So you’ve got all those different abilities right within this document.
As far as writing, it seems to be just a fine word processor to write in but the key to
Dropbox Paper is not necessarily composition.
It’s all about collaboration and the fact that we can set up and we can share the document
back and forth and work on it collaboratively is the real magic behind Dropbox paper.
And one thing that I really noticed very valuable is you can also go in and view the history,
which will allow you to see the history of the document and the edits and changes.
Now this is really important in a collaborative document because sometimes people make a change
that you want to go back or you want to review what that change was.
And a key to it right now is the revisions do not count against your Dropbox storage
space either.
So the original document doesn’t count and you can have as many revisions as you want
that also don’t count against your Dropbox storage space.
I think that this is a really nice first step.
As far as collaborative word processing goes, this is one of the nicest tools that I've
seen.
Actually, I'm going to say more than that.
I'm going to say this is the nicest collaborative word processing tool that I've seen.
I like how they defined each element within the document as its own kind of little snippet
that you can go through and edit and you can manage in that way.
Once you copy and paste it, it all just becomes one contiguous document so that’s not a
big deal.
I love the fact that the comments are kind of in line but just slightly removed so that
you can go at any point in the page and you can add a comment.
It’s kind of attached to that little web—I'm calling it a snippet; maybe they have a better
term for it—so I really like that as well.
Now not only do we have the ability to edit and manage the documents here on our desktop,
but there’s also a fairly full-featured smartphone client for it.
Let me just take you into that and show you that for just a moment.
I've got it here on my iPhone and when I go into it, I can see the entire roster of stories
that we’ve shared that I have in my life.
And if I tap, let’s take a look at this story that we’re working on right here right
now and we can see that we have all of the same formatting available to us.
It resolves really nicely in the smartphone.
I can go through and I can do most of what I can do on the desktop right here on the
smartphone.
But I think for the most part on the smartphone, you’re just going to be reading it and—I
wonder if we can comment.
Can we comment?
Yes, if I add a comment.
Oh, it does.
It allows me to add a comment.
Beautiful.
I haven’t tried that yet on the smartphone.
So you can do the same basic collaboration as we do on the desktop here on the smartphone.
Dropbox Paper is a collaborative tool which I think most people are going to start out
by comparing immediately to Google Drive, but I think that the simple collaboration,
the fact that they’ve looked at how we talk back and forth as we’re working on a document,
they’ve paid more attention to that than they have to giving us a full-featured office
suite the way that Google Drive is.
It’s a simpler application but I think it’s more functional as far as a true collaborative
process, at least at this point.
And this is just their first revision of the application.
I didn’t think that I was going to like Dropbox Paper as much as I do like Dropbox
Paper but after using it for a little bit, it’s already become a tool that we’ve
decided that we’re going to use at least for the time being here at DottoTech.
Well, I hope that you found today’s video to be useful.
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Till next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!