My sincere apologies for failing to post, as promised, each Monday. My only excuse is that yesterday turned out to be much busier (but much more exciting!) than I had planned. To make a long story short, I am now involved in planning the first (hopefully) annual swing dancing event for Athens, Georgia. Our “quick” meeting yesterday evening lasted over three hours, and thus my blog post did not get written.

However, the planning process did teach me more about Google Docs, which I am going to pass on to all you lovely readers. For those of you who have never used Google Docs, well… you’re missing out. They make planning sessions much simpler because you can all be looking at the same document of meeting notes from anywhere in the world and edit it in real time. So even if I’m at my house and you’re all the way on the other side of the globe, we can both be editing the same document at the same time. You can literally watch the other person type a new sentence. You can share your document with anyone you want, and you decide if each new person is able to edit or just view the document.

Even better are the features I learned about last night. Google Docs have a comments feature that is similar to “track changes” in Word. You can highlight a letter/word/sentence/whatever and insert a comment about it. That comment then starts a new thread, shown to the right of the document. You and everyone else on your team can dialogue until you’ve resolved the issue, at which point you label the comment “resolved,” and it goes away. Google Docs also have an in-screen chat feature, so you could actually have a virtual meeting. Simply click in the top right corner where it says “you and x others are viewing,” and the chat window will cascade down. If you don’t want to use the chat feature, you can easily hide it again.

To top it all off, Google Docs can be used to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, forms and drawings. They all have a pretty decent set of formatting options that are similar to those in MS Office. You can also use Google Docs to view any MS Office document in your browser. Finally, the Google Docs home screen allows you to organize your documents into “collections,” which are essentially folders. Oh yeah, and all of this is free. The only requirement is a Google account, which is free to acquire. Amazing, isn’t it?