Student Watch: Google's Docs and Spreadsheets

For many students, trying to complete a report is tough, especially for those students that have a life outside of school. Schools have been increasingly flexible over the last few years in terms of class accessibility, including online-only classes, full online degrees, internet forums for classroom-based courses and tv-based coursework. Many colleges and universities, including some distance-learning high schools, offer a full copy of programs like Microsoft Office to complete their work. Low income families, however, who have the most to gain from advanced degrees, don't always have a computer at home. Many online schools can be attended at local libraries but the library computers don't always have access to Word or Excel.

Google's Documents and Spreadsheets - a combination of Writely, an acquired web-based word processing app added to Google in March of 2006, and Google Spreadsheets, launched in the Google Labs in June of 2006 - is the tool that can wire a student to productivity. While specific formatting features, such as templates or margins, are not available in this kind of word processor, the rest of the necessary tools make the roster of features for Docs and Spreadsheets, including some features Microsoft makes too complicated to consider. For instance, the HTML editor in Word has forever been a cumbersome web to weave. Being as Google Docs is web-based, it is easy to edit and preview an HTML document, as well as save it to your hard drive. No extra XML code clogging your pages... What a sweet deal.