Google documents

At its simplest, this is a very straightforward way of storing documents, presentations and spreadsheets on the web so that you can access them from any computer.

I like it for that alone (apart from the spreadsheets - they give me nightmares) because I can prepare teaching stuff and not worry about carrying it around on a memory stick.

I can write/create within google, or import it from elsewhere. Tried it with a word document and it was slooooooow., so won't do that again.

Other plus points:

• decent storage capacity - here are the figures
• different file types eg pdf, txt, rdf, html
  
• can publish easily to a blog/website or attach to email
  
• lots of help - sometimes a bit too much but here is a good short intro
• it keeps track of changes to your documents so you can roll back to an earlier version if you want
• you can use it to collaborate online with other people AND choose which bits of your docs are public and which private
• can use it offline too

Some drawbacks:

• slow upload of docs from word etc
  
• some configuration to do to get the full benefit (ain't that always the way)
• you may not want to share stuff
  
• I don't think I would keep all my documents online, so I need to keep an eye on what's filed where and would keep a backup somewhere else
  
• gmail went missing a while back - what if the same happened with docs?

Overall:

I have started to use it despite the (minor) drawbacks. It's also handy to do this kind of task from the same 'desktop' as gmail, groups, blog feeds etc using igoogle.

Just one question for Bill - I set up my own google docs account before the course, not for sharing/collaboration, just to try it out. How do I now come to have some shared docs and a whole list of admittedly very friendly people to share them with, in what I thought was a single user account?

David