By Bruce O’Neal
Why Google Documents?
Two Words: Convenience and Collaboration
Documents (Google Docs) are part of a suite of applications that reside inside of your Google Gmail account. If you have a Gmail account, you already have access to a rich suite of applications including Calendar, Photos, an RSS reader simply called Reader, and even blogging tools through Blogger. To get started you will need an email account through Gmail. Just point your browser to www.gmail.com to get started.
Google Gmail – Convenience
Gmail works like just about all other email clients out there (Hotmail and Yahoo) meaning you can access, send/receive email anywhere there is an Internet connection. One nice feature is that you’ll probably never run out of storage space for all your sent and received mail as Gmail gives you a generous 7 MB of storage capacity. Another nice feature is that you can send and receive huge files (up to 10 MB). If you need the ability to send and receive large files and not have to worry about your email box being full, or wondering which emails you can delete to free up space, you should investigate Gmail. Another nice feature is that Gmail allows POP access. Without going into too much boring tech-speak (sorry my tech buddies) this feature allows you to configure your email client (such as Outlook, Apple Mail, Eudora, or Thunderbird) to send and receive mail; this is a nice feature that saves you from having to use the web interface. Gmail even allows IMAP access if you are stickler about keeping mail synchronized between several different devices such as a laptop, iPhone, and desktop machine.
Google Documents – Collaboration
Google Docs has an impressive list of applications including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, and even forms which allows you to quickly create forms to capture information (it gets saved to an online spreadsheet). The beauty of Google Docs is not in their feature set, but in the ability you have to share information and collaborate with others.
Any document created in Google Docs can be shared with anyone with an email address. The person or persons you share it with can be given individual rights, so one person might have read-only rights and another could have full editing rights. If you are working on a team paper, presentation or spreadsheet, this feature is compelling. You no longer have to email different versions of the document back-and-forth to one another, only login-in and update one document as needed. Changes happen in real-time and changes are kept automatically as versions that you can revert to at any time. Because your documents are saved online, you can forget having to carry your jump drives for data retrieval as you access the files over an Internet connection.
Most importantly, Google Docs allows you to save or even upload documents from many different formats including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and even Adobe PDF.
Oh, two more quick things. Google Docs and Gmail are free–as in no cost to use. Also, Google Docs is in beta, but don’t let that scare you … just about every Google product seems to remain in perpetual beta status.
