Google Docs: MS Office Without The Price Tag

Scenario: You use MS Office, but you resent paying hundreds of bucks for the privilege
Solution: Google Docs is essentially a free version of MS Office. That's right. Free.



Probably the most commonly used set of applications at work or at home is the MS Office suite - consisting of Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Of course you have to pay a tidy sum in order to use these apps, which is why Bill Gates is a multi-billionaire and why the rest of us are at home living on cereal and worrying that an over-zealous 23-year-old banker might have gambled away our 401k.

While Bill and Co. continued to milk their lovely little Office application for all it was worth, along came Google with both middle fingers raised and decided to offer essentially the same set of programs - for free.

Just to rub salt into the wound the Google version - Google Docs - is Web based which means not only does Google store all your documents for you, but you can also access them from any computer connected to the Internet. But those young upstarts at Google weren't finished yet - not only did they make sure that you could open and save documents in all the popular MS Office formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) but they also built a very cool sharing feature which lets groups of people collaborate on and edit the same document at the same time.

So at this point you might be asking the question "Why would I need to pay Microsoft hundreds of dollars to use MS Office when Google essentially offers most of the same features for free."

Exactly.