Based on a brief twitter discussion a couple months ago, I decided to make the progressive leap to use Google docs, rather than Microsoft Word, for my first grant proposal. While this had many pros, I'm not yet convinced this was a good idea, and might have been scared away for now.

Pros

Cons

In the end, there was quite a bit of manually editing the PDF to make small changes. Not what I wanted to be doing in the last minute.

Google docs could make sense for collaborative editing where the google doc is not the final published product: e.g. manuscript drafts where figures are submitted separately anyway, or meeting agendas, etc. But until these issues are fixed I'm not sure I will stick with it for serious writing efforts. I was really hoping to make it work, so I'd love to hear people's thoughts on how to get around these issues!