The absence of footnotes in Google Documents was the last thing holding me back from recommending that University students use Google Documents for writing.  Today on the official Google Docs Blog Andrew Chang announced that, “last week we added support for footnotes“.  Now Google Docs not only one of the better free platforms for collaborative document editing (for group projects for example), but now citing and referencing material in your documents has become a lot easier.

Before this week I suggested that students working on group projects, use Google documents for collaborating on creating and editing, and then once the majority of the collaboration work was done, export the document to Word or OpenOffice and add footnotes there.  Now the footnoting can be done as the document is created.  Google Docs is capable of editing a University level paper, end to end.  For groups especially I will be recommending Google Docs at the editing tool of choice.

Here is a list of other features that have recently been added to Google Docs.