Sharing Documents

I have been looking at the new Google Documents facility and it looks really useful if you need to work on documents together with other people. At the moment most of us who collaborate on editing a document (e.g. magazine article) will pass drafts backwards and forwards until we agree on a finished version. One big problem with this as that multiple copies can exist at any one time and no one is quite sure which is the most up to date. The new application avoids this problem by keeping only one master copy, this being maintained on an online server. Anyone who wants to work on the document can sign in and work online - hey presto the online version is always up to date. Document types include text (like Word) spreadsheet and presentations and you can create folders to keep everything tidy. It is also possible to download some software which allows documents created on your own computer to be uploaded and then kept in sync every time you connect. Docs created with commonly used applications can be converted. There is a good video on Google's site which explains it all. The idea is part of the so-called 'cloud computing' technique and I think we are going to be hearing a lot more about this in the future.
Well, this seems like a great new idea and could prove useful to some U3A people. It will be interesting to see where it goes. Perhaps we should not throw all our office application software out just yet but who knows what the future may hold.

Rick