Google Docs helped me graduate from college!

Have you ever wondered just who out there is using Google Docs and what they are using it for? Personally, I rarely run into links to Google Docs documents, spreadsheets, and presentations on the open Web, but there's no question that it has become a very popular service. I strongly suspect that an awful lot of people who use Google Docs use it to store information relevant to them, but end up never sharing it with others even though the ability to share is supposedly Google Docs' killer feature. For a long time, I myself was one of those non-sharing types; in fact, I still use Google Docs for such things as archiving my blog posts and storing weapon/armor stats from a MUD that I play. I don't bother to share stuff like that, even though the information isn't particularly private or dangerous to share. Similarly, I think a lot of Docs' early adopters use the service to calculate their car's gas mileage, write to-do lists, and other similar small tasks.

However, I'm happy to say that I have also used Google Docs on an important collaborative project. As a science major at a small university, I generally submitted my experimental data to my professors in paper form, though I did email out a fair number of Excel spreadsheets during my academic career. This worked fine because, although I often worked with other people in the lab to collect data, the data analysis process was something I did independently of others. As a graduating senior, I was given a slightly different task than what I was used to. Another senior and myself were asked to collaborate on a project not only by working together in the lab but also by analyzing and writing about the data we collected. It didn't take me long to realize that Google Docs could help my team out a lot. As it turned out, my partner had never used Google Docs before, but he was willing to give it a shot. An adventure began!

We actually ended up using Google Docs at every stage of our collaboration. While we were still working in the lab, we used spreadsheets to organize our data. After our time in the lab was over, we used Google Docs primarily to write collaboratively. In fact, the last bit of classwork we did in that last semester involved editing a Google document! It ended up working out great -- far better than I really expected considering that my partner was a Google Docs neophyte. If I ever go to graduate school, I'm definitely intending to make extensive use of online sharing and collaborative tools.

This experience really brought home for me just how powerful a thing Google has developed here. While Google Docs may not be a particularly feature-rich online office suite, its simplicity is a strength if all one needs to do are simple things. The simplicity of Google Docs made it easy for my partner to get started collaborating and sharing with me -- there was no significant learning curve that we had to cross because using Google Docs is pretty intuitive for people who have used office software before. Simply put, Google Docs just worked for us. We were able to get down to business right away and get our project finished. I'm not much of a collaborationist in my heart of hearts -- I tend to think groups are by their very nature inefficient and have endured working in them only because I rationalized them as a necessary evil. Google Docs and its competitors have, in my opinion, the capability and the promise to remove some of the evil of working in groups -- they can make a process that naturally tends towards inefficiency much more efficient. Thanks, Google -- you got me through college!