i had a weird situation with my bachelor thesis on the last day: I saved a lot with clicking the floppy icon but when i was in the folder i noticed that the date of my file didn't change while doing that. Luckily I had the file still open and thus saved with "save file as" otherwise it could have ended badly.
My freshman year English professor said she lost about 50 pages of her thesis when her hard drive crashed. It happened in the late 90s before backups were as commonplace.
I write all my university work in Google Docs. Although if I have to do Table Of Contents or anything I copy it into Word and do it there, the ToC in Docs is a bit lacking. I also wish it had Word's system for keeping track of references.
Yeah, those are a couple of the missing things from Google docs that it needs for College use. And, a more advanced grammar checker.
The presentation google app, on the other hand, is more then adequate and replaces power point quite effectively. In some ways I found it easier and quicker to use, especially to make simple graphics and flowcharts.
The collaboration functions make it easier to overlook the shortcomings.
Excel, conversely... Microsoft should hope nobody catches up, it's their bread and butter at this point.