Google Docs Rocks!

Google is now offering another application to its already impressive legacy: Google Documents; a free online version of a web-based word processor, presentation, and spreadsheet application. The most valuable feature of it is users can collaborate with other users they select to share the documents with.  Meaning one document can be edited by multiple users.

I kept reading about this topic, and when I read what Seth Godin had to say I finally decided to write my post about it. I consider Google Docs a useful application, and we actually put it to use for our chapter presentation (which was stormed out). Since we had difficulty getting together to complete our slide presentation, with the crazy weather we’ve been getting, Dave C suggested to complete our slide presentation using Google Documents. Although we had some troubles getting started (deciding whether to use upei.ca student accounts or gmail.com accounts) we eventually finished the presentation. So it proved to be very useful in our situation. And this system can be used with lots of other examples in mind, like writing a book or collecting survey information.

 

There is some speculation regarding the application, since the information placed in the documents are saved on Google’s servers. Also, there are limitations to the amount of storage each user has available. But these problems will most likely improve in the future.  There is also a great deal of good commentary from product users. For anyone who wishes to check it out for themselves, here’s a Google Docs Tour Link. I can see this application being used a lot in Business schools. It sure made our group project a lot easier. And perhaps with the topic covered in this week’s Wikinomics chapter, maybe future sharing and collaborating of scientific journals and articles will be created using similar processor applications.

Tasia