Replaced Evernote for notes and Google Drive for collaboration – Quip - Docs, Chat, Sheets Review

Strengths • Best doc collaboration app - feed of doc comments or Inbox is an evolution beyond competition. • Project management by tagging task owners in their respective to-do and adding a date • Tasks Due generate a Reminder the day before and every day after until the task is marked complete • Spreadsheet and To-do documents can be integrated into docs, other cloud platforms only allow tables, not true spreadsheet integration • Easiest to use, especially for the inexperienced • Keyboard shortcuts - vastly superior outlining and other formatting available that is not on Google Drive or Apple iWork. Weaknesses • Find does not take you to the term. It only takes you to the document. Very frustrating for large documents. • Outline mode - was announced, initiated, and then removed. Makes large doc navigation terrible. • Scroll bar - maybe with iOS 13 it will be easy to implement. • Siri cannot search within Quip docs. This silos searching. People should not have to search each app to find info, Siri should index all my data. We all have GBs of data now, it's crazy to expect us to remember which app has what bytes of data. • Lack of Parity app with Desktop features - there are plenty of great features available in the desktop browser missing from iOS apps: spreadsheet filter, spreadsheet validation, alignment, picture pasting in cells, picture selection (makes deletion difficult is there is no space after an image), and more. • Spreadsheet copy-paste does not work from google sheets. Discourages quip adoption from other tools. • Only as you go Spell Check. There should be a manual option to spell check doc, because when you paste a lot of text there is no spell check. Opportunities • Master Task List - (Thanks you so much for improving the Spreadsheet and Checklist feature to manage projects!) It would be great to have a Master Task or Project List feature. There all the spreadsheets or checklists which have a due date active have all the tasks with due dates listed in the Master Task List (MTL). If a checklist has a date that date chould appear as a column in the MTL. The spreadsheet name or the header just above the checklist can serve as a Project column. Projects could even show their folder directory to allow for sub projects. Ideally, if a hashtag is included in the spreadsheet or checklist row, that will also be included in a hashtag column in the MTL. This would then allow for filters and sorting in this view by task owner, due date, project, hashtag. If you then allowed smart filters, this would allow personal as project oversight. If the to-do functions were made iCal compatible, then you could sync Quip projects into your Google Calendar and other calendar tools. The reason why this is needed is that as teams use Quip more and more for projectivity, the greater the risk that to-do items in various docs and spreadsheets will get missed. Filtering out to-dos from all the docs and spreadsheets in Quip would be a great step forward in project management. Why 5 Star if there is opportunity for improvement? Because I'm comparing it to other collaborative tools and it spanks them all (e.g. Google Drive, Apple iWork, Box Notes, Bitrix24, Freedbase, etc.) in terms of a vision of how humans will collaborate in the future: it's the document stupid.
Review by darmok on Quip - Docs, Chat, Sheets.