Online Productivity!

I think we looked briefly at Google Docs in an earlier Thing, but I'm not sure which one. I've been using it to compose my blogs ever since. It lets me take my time, saving my work automatically, and I don't have to worry about losing my thoughts in the blogger abyss. It's very easy to use as it's set up almost exactly like Microsoft Office products.
I should have waited to go to college. Using Google Docs would have made group projects and reports MUCH easier. Generally, to finish a collaborative lab experiment report, one person in the group types up the data in Word, then emails it to the next student, who makes a chart in Excel. The data and chart are then emailed or copied to a disc and given to a 3rd person, who writes out the procedure. All of that information is then sent to another student, who uses it to write up the results and explain everything that (inevitably) went wrong during lab. To be able to share the same information while everyone can sit at whatever computer they wish would have made life incredibly easy (no more camping out overnight in the Science Center!). Emailing data multiple times always resulted in damaged documents anyway, so that it was necessary to copy and paste the data into a new file occasionally.
Library staff could use the collaboration feature among themselves (and across libraries) to make banners, come up with program ideas and create presentations.
All in all, Go Google Docs!