One of the things I love about Google is that they're constantly coming up with new inventions. Not just content to be the king of the search engines - they actually have a full house of powerful tools and gadgets.
Have you ever been traveling, at work or maybe a friend'shouse, and wished you had access to a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, or Excel spreadsheet that was at home on your hard drive? This actually happened to me, which is when I found and fell in love with Google Docs. http://www.google.com/docs
Imagine having access to your documents from anywhere,with just a computer and Internet access. Google docsis compatible with Microsoft Office so it can handle any of your existing documents, but even if you don't own it, now you don't have to. Google Docs is a full fledged word processor, presentation creator and spreadsheet maker all rolled into one. No need to buy and install expensive software that takes upvaluable hard drive space. This online beauty can do it all for you, even offering an extensive array of templates at your disposal.
All docs created with Google can be exported and savedto your computer in these formats: Doc, ODS, ODT, PDF,RTF, even HTML. This makes it easy to save the finished product to your hard drive and print them out later. It even includes a "print preview" feature if you need to check your formatting.
Another nice benefit of using Google Docs is the ability for multiple people to edit and work on the same projectall at the same time. It's easy to invite others to viewor edit your docs by sending them an email invitation. You can even choose to be notified by email when others you're working with make any changes to it. How cool is that?
Google Docs offers support for 40 languages. Need to turn a project into a web page? Not a problem. Are you a Blogger?Type up your post and when it's done have it posted to your Blog with one click. This is a handy tool for any Blogger to add to their toolkit.
So what else can you do?
- Create drawings and diagrams and easily use them in your creations.
- Add footnotes to reports
- Create forms- you can even grab the code to embed the form on your web page.
- Making a presentation? It's easy to add those speaker notes.
- Add videos to your presentations.
- Color code all of your Google Doc folders to sort and find things easily.
- Need to put images in a spreadsheet? No problem.
- Upload PDF's to share. You can't edit them yet, but you can select sections of text and copy them to other documents.
- Take slideshows you create and embed them on to any web page, or your blog.
- Need access to your docs from your cell phone? Google's got you covered. Just point your browser to http://docs.google.com/m
- Chart creation is a snap
- OffiSync- Brings the power of Google Docs to Microsoft Office http://www.offisync.com/
This is just a small sampling of some of the things you can do with this online document creator. Now that you know your options, the next time you need to create a presentation or document, why not try Google Docs? It's free and you'll absolutely love the fact of all of your documents being "portable". I know I do.
(photo above courtesy of http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ )
