Where’s My Document??!!

(A supplement to the wildly popular ‘Where’s My listing” series)…
There’s nothing like getting to the office and finding that you’ve left that important document you’ve been working on back on your home computer. Or, if you have an assistant, having her (or him) in one place, and you in another, e-mailing files back and forth to each other. Been there, hated that.

Over the past few months, I’ve been testing an on-line document system that is quite effective, easily shared, and available anywhere in the world that you can find an Internet connection. I’ve found it especially useful in my system to manage the many places that I post our listings, because I work on that from home and from the office. I have a remote system that lets me easily work on different computers, but it’s a pain to keep transferring files back and forth.

Everyone knows Google, right? Well, they are the provider of this marvelous system. Here’s how it works:

First, go to docs.google.com. You will see a link to create a new account. All you really need is a user name and password. If you’re working as a team, you can use a team name, or just your own. If this is something that you might use personally, in addition to sharing with an assistant, don’t use your common personal login info. After you enter the information, Google will send you an e-mail to the account you entered for confirmation. The e-mail will show up almost immediately, so you can keep going.

When the e-mail arrvies, click the link to activate the account, then the “click here to continue link.” You’ll be taken to the document workspace, and you’re off and running. You can either create a new document, or upload existing ones – that’s right, you can upload a word, excel, or powerpoint document from your computer to the workspace, and the system will take it right up.

In the upper left-hand corner, you’ll see a New option, where you can start a new document, spreadsheet or presentation. You can work away on the document, save it when you’re done, then go to the office, open it up on any computer, and keep on truckin! Pretty cool.

It gets better. On the main screen, you’ll find a list of documents that you’ve created. There’s a checkbox to the left of each document. Check the checkbox for one or more of them, then choose “Share” on the main menu. You can then enter one or more e-mail addresses of people you want to see the document – you can even give permission to view only, or allow changes to be made.

Try this out! You will be a convert, and you will certainly find your live SO much easier – by keeping your documents in a central location, you’ve just become highly mobile – work from anywhere! Best of all, you can download any or all of the documents to your home or office computer for backup purposes – and keep on working online.

Happy Computing!