Paper is Dropbox’s answer to Google Docs (sort of)

For businesses so invested in our digital lives, tech companies really seem to like naming their products ‘Paper:’ First Facebook, then FiftyThree and now Dropbox.

Dropbox Paper is a rebranding of its Notes product for collaborative documents, launched as a private beta earlier in the year (Dropbox also had a related product called Composer). According to Engadget, the company gearing up to expand the beta significantly as it finalizes the product for public release.

At first glance, Paper is just a minimalist Web text editor. You log in with your Dropbox account, with only basic formatting options (seriously, there’s only one font and three sizes). But it’s real power seems to shine through with collaboration, where Dropbox is looking to take the lead over established players like Google Docs and Microsoft Office.

The company says it’s looking to reduce fragmentation in the online workplace, and it does so by making Paper more of a canvas for collaboration than a content creation platform. For instance, you can import any document from your Dropbox account, and it a preview will be formatted automatically onto the program. The same goes if you share a URL, photo, video, Spotify or SoundCloud song or even a Google Docs or Drive file.

All the items are draggable and resizeable; you can create image galleries, or blow one image to fill up the entire browser window. Meanwhile, you can also comment anywhere in the Paper document, and Dropbox is even adding stickers for some extra pizzazz. And to emphasize Paper’s collaborative nature, new files are shared with your team by default.

It’s hard to say how Dropbox will shift people over from Docs and Office, but at the very least Dropbox is offering a novel solution; rather than having a ton of different documents all for different projects, Paper lets you organize them all into one collaborative narrative. While some more powerful content creation tools will likely come later, at least the company is starting out with features not available on competing platforms.

For more on Paper, head on over to Engadget’s report at the source link below. You can sign up for the beta waitlist here.

➤ Paper is Dropbox’s new vision for how teams can work together [Engadget]