Gary Lucero Writer

When I found Obsidian it felt like a major score. OneNote by then was long in the tooth. Useful, yes, full-featured, absolutely, but also old and hard to work with. Plus, OneNote often creates ugly notes as you copy from various sources and paste into it. If you don’t take the time to format notes consistently, the fonts and other formatting get out of control quickly.

Obsidian not only offered a gorgeous font that was consistently applied to every note, but notes are plain text (markdown), easy to back up, and formatting is as simple as typing a few characters.Then there’s plugins. Thousands of them. Able to handle just about any task Obsidian can’t handle on its own. 

Problem is, it seemed like I needed a new plugin every week. Every single shortcoming in the application could be overcome by a simple download. This became tiring. Exhausting even.

Suddenly I was a slave to an application instead of its master. What at first was simple, beautiful even, became ugly, tiresome, and I began to hate it.

Yes, I hate Obsidian. I can’t stand using it anymore. 

Then someone at work mentioned using Google Docs for notes. 

I investigated and it appealed to me for a number of reasons.

1. While Obsidian requires a plugin to allow semantic search, as long as what you store in Google Drive, which is where Google Docs is hosted, is in a format and structure it understands, it’s fully searchable with Gemini
2. Similar to OneNote, and unlike Microsoft Word, a Google Docs document can have multiple tabs, or sections, which means one document can serve as the container for many different notes
3. It’s all backed by Google, which is already my main provider of mobile operating system, e-mail, reminders, calendar events, and AI
4. It gets me away from plugins, which are a blight on humanity as far as I’m concerned
5. It offers the same sorts of formatting options as OneNote, but is less complicated

There are a few downsides because it’s mostly web-based, at least on PC. But so far that hasn’t been an issue. And it has excellent native support on Android.

In the end, it’s yet another note taking application, but it’s also more than that. Similar to Microsoft’s Office suite, I can create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations all in one place, and I no longer have to keep notes in a completely separate application.

It doesn’t mean I’ve done away with a family subscription to Office 365. My daughter and I need all the cloud space it provides for our legacy documents, photos, and other files, and I still use Excel on occasion, but I’m finding Google Drive and Google Docs a welcoming new home for most everything else I do.