How I work - Google Docs

Most of the time when I leave my home office, I take only a tablet, either an iPad or Nexus 7.

My editors prefer plain HTML with separate image files. They can work with Word files, but strip out most of the formatting. I use Word mostly for the editing tools such as auto-correct, word count, and grammar checking.

There are a lot of make-do products that let you work with Microsoft Word documents. Office 365, the web version of Office, is one of them. You access it through a browser from any device. In addition, I could use WordPress or similar blogging product to create my docs.

Google Docs provides a good editing environment for documents, covering the basic features of headers, styled paragraphs, links, and images. A recently added features permits offline access to files. I can edit my my files when not connected to the Internet. Google Docs will synchronize the edited docs when I reconnect.

The trouble with Office 365 and Google Docs is that the HTML output that they generate gives spaghetti code a bad name. It's bloated and doesn't create a separate CSS file to segregate the formatting code.

I'm trying a cleanup tool called Tidy-HTML5. It's an experimental variant on the tidy/html-tidy family of tools. It has a -gdoc switch that cleans up the HTML. Tidy-HTML5 requires a *nix environment where you can compile the tool. It works well on Cygwin.

The Android version of Google Drive (the app that provides docs and spreadsheets) doesn't support direct editing of spreadsheets. You can open the spreadsheet in your browser  and make edits there. I've tested spreadsheet editing in Safari and Chrome on the iPad and Chrome on the Nexus 7.