If you haven’t yet tried the excellent Google Docs, I’d strongly recommend it. For the average user it can replace Microsoft Office but with a host of excellent additions such as collaborative document sharing – which allows you and a designated person to edit the same document almost simultaneously in real-time. This is really helpful during phone conversations when you can literally make a change to a Word doc, spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation and the person on the other end of the line can see your change immediately. Google Docs is also 100 per cent Web based, which means all your docs are accessible from any computer with an Internet connection.

Most US corporations would save huge amounts of time and money by switching to Google docs, but that assumes the majority of IT departments want to create systems to actually benefit the end user as opposed to protecting their own jobs. Anybody who’s worked in a corporation will understand this definitely isn’t the case.

Well Google has just added one more reason to switch to its Docs product and this one could be a game changer – the ability to edit documents on your iPhone, iPad or Android device. Now as much as I love the iPad, the choices to create and edit documents are horrible. Apple’s own Pages, Numbers and Keynote just about scrape by but still feel clunky and half-baked. Beyond those three there really isn’t another standout app that lets you edit documents. But now with Google Docs, I can access any file from my Google Docs account (as long as I have an internet or 3G connection), make as many edits as I need and save all the changes. Finally iPad users have a usable option for document creation and management.

And while Google is rolling-out these features for its Docs product, what devious plans does Microsoft have to retaliate and make sure Office keeps up? I’ll get back to you on that one.