Dropbox introduces new work tool Paper; aims to compete with Google Docs

Earlier this year, Dropbox bought note-making services Notes and quietly started an invite-only beta test. Now, the company has officially launched what it calls Paper, to take on similar tools from Google, Microsoft and others. Dropbox’s Paper is still a web-only app and can be accessed via the user’s Dropbox account, but the company has promised mobile versions soon. Just like Google Docs, it will allow multiple users to edit a document. Each user is displayed as a coloured cursor and the full name is displayed in the margins.  “From a text perspective, Paper is quite basic; there’s only one font and three sizes available. You can do your basic bold, italics, underline and strike-through formatting and format text into a block quote, but that’s about it. Dropbox specifically said that the purpose of Paper was to keep the focus on sharing ideas rather than formatting,” states Engadget. With Paper, users can add to-do lists along with check-boxes, and also ‘@’ in case you want to assign the task to someone. It allows dragging and dropping single photos in order to save them. Since everything is can be dragged, re-ordering files is made simple. With Paper, Dropbox will also let you respond using stickers. “The more interesting thing about Paper is the way that it handles rich media: you can embed YouTube videos and SoundCloud files simply by pasting in the URL, or tap the “+” button next to any paragraph to access a menu that will let you add photos, tables, or links to other Dropbox files, among other things. It all looks great, and I imagine that creative types who work on teams will appreciate having rich media embedded in the documents they’re working on rather than in a series of infinite tabs,” TheVerge writes in its hands-on with Paper. With the new feature, Dropbox has made its plans of offering a workplace collaboration platform quite clear.