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.