Image via CrunchBase
Face it: Most of us own, work on or have access to more than one computer. If you’re working on a project you need to take along wherever you go, you have some choices: carry a laptop, use CDs or flash drives, or save your work to a cloud server.
Cloud computing may be a buzzword with implications of global information-accumulating (SkyNet, anyone?), but it’s been around for years in the form of Gmail and other Internet-based applications that store users’ unique e-mails and attachments. The point of having a Gmail.com address (or hotmail, or yahoo, or any free Internet-based e-mail service) is that you can access your inbox from anywhere you have an Internet connection.
If you need to take your work a step further, Google Docs offers basic word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, forms, drawings and collections. These are simple applications, but compatible with the most popular programs on your hard drive. A cloud server such as Google Docs is indispensable if you have saved information you need to access often from various locations, such as form letters or client lists.
You can also set your documents in Google Docs to be seen and shared by certain people, the public, or just yourself. Setting up interactivity like this allows teachers to collect assignments from students, make corrections or notes, and re-save them to the folder, as one example. Various tags can be used to indicate the status of a document so students can see when their work has been reviewed.
So stop searching for your lost thumb drive and pack away those CDs you never labeled. Get your head in the clouds.
