Hello Google Docs!

Wow. A few weeks ago I got on an agitated cleaning bin and have filled my garage with donations, I've rearranged, cleared out a ton of clutter...... and entropy is happening to me again, but I made progress and I'm motivated to make more.

My mantra is put it away, give it away, throw it away.  And if it is broken or worn, replace it.

I got new entryway rugs at a hell of a bargain, and it is amazing how dingy things got after almost two decades, and how you can really get used to things that should have been thrown out years ago.

My favorite replace was getting rid of my mismatched, barely functional toaster. I bought a sleek four slot model that made family breakfast so much easier, with bagel and defrost settings that haven't burnt anything yet. And it looks great on the counter.  I decided that this new toaster was going to change my life. Here I come functionality, simplicity, ease of use.

Well I'll see how great a change that toaster gets me. But this week, I know I found something that will change my life.

Google Docs.

My daughter has been using them all year at school. For the first year in five or six years, we no longer scramble for usb drives or external media to shuffle school papers, or worry that the document will be lost or jumbled in email. That by it's self is priceless. But wait - there's more.

As a Windows Office user since the the early 90's I've been frustrated with every new version that I have to relearn where all the functions I use have hidden this time. I knew Office and Excel inside out in the 3.1 version and after Vista and Windows 7 versions are done with me, I can barely make a table without staring at little picture icons for half an hour. I spend more time on help looking for things that have moved or been hidden or my favorite, removed than I spend on the actual documents I make.

Enter Google Docs. You don't need external software, just internet and Google. The document interface is functional, simple and it looks great, just like my toaster. Creating a document is as simple as this blogger template, I just didn't know there was an app. I asked my daughter to show me how it works last night - total training time less than two minutes. The Google docs icon looks like a recycling triangle, and once I clicked that and found the create button, I was good to go.

But wait - there's more. Google docs is updated every keystroke. So if like me, your computers periodically glitch out or your creaky fingers hit the wrong key and you lose something, that can't happen on google docs.

I have stopped using my old Office products, because Google docs is a quantum leap into the product I didn't know I needed. It is my word processor and hard drive in the cloud. It will seem silly to me that I ever had to hunt through my documents on multiple devices to find something I needed. It will please me endlessly to stop finding new ways to despise the ever changing and increasingly troubled Microsoft products.

Google Calendar simplified scheduling our lives in ways I couldn't have imagined. Youtube, Blogger, Kindle Cloud Drive, Google Search, I love them all.  I am going to let Google whisk me into the future.

Google Docs. This will change my life for the better. I'm sure of it.