Goodle Docs is a great product, but for serious uses, it's sorely lacking in the features department.
It's odd, because even features from the 90's like mail merge are missing. Mail merge as a feature is something most coders could automate in a few hours. Why isn't it in the product so the rest of the world can use it?
How about footnotes? References? Multi-column layouts? A mixture of portrait and landscape pages? Captions on tables? Flow text around a circular image?
The list of lacking or hobbled features is really long. The unmatched live collaboration features are really the only place it shines.
Yeah, but MS Office is missing transparent font embedding and cross OS file sharing (even between different versions of windows or office).
The upshot is the giving PowerPoint presentations is hit or miss / embarrassing, but gsuite presentations usually just work.
The same can be said for sharing spreadsheets, etc. Writing documents is fundamentally a form of communication, and MS Office is built with the fundamental assumption that you will share your work by printing it out. The retrofit PDF export works OK, but sharing editable documents does not, and I think they need to from-scratch rewrite the core document engine to fix the problem.
I haven't needed that in over 15 years, but if you need this, install this add-on for free [1].
> footnotes
Insert > Footnote
> References
Tools > Research, Cite as Footnote
> Multi-column layouts
Format > Columns
> A mixture of portrait and landscape pages?
This is hard to do in Word too. If you really need this, make two Google docs (landscape, portrait, and then a Word Doc that integrates the two that you keep in Read-Only mode).
But really, why is this needed for serious uses and considered "seriously lacking?"
> Captions on tables
This could be done by just inserting text and formatting the way you want. I don't think you can generate a table of tables though.
Do you have a list of commonly used "hobbled" features? None of these are something I've had a need to do for decades.
I'm not sure the average user needs mail merge anymore? These days there are specialized web sites for things like emailing party invites to your friends and keeping track of responses.
Similarly, multicolumn layouts are an annoyance to read online, so perhaps not as popular with people who don't print things out. There are website-building web apps these days that do basic sidebars.
