I just want to throw a “shout out” for Google Docs. I love Google Docs.
Brette and I did all our wedding planning using it. We created a spreadsheet containing all the people we wanted to invite, and shared that document with our parents. This was great because our parents filled out the mailing addresses for aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends of the families without having to email documents back and forth, or relying on me to make changes in a master copy. Without the sharing and collaborative editing, this would have been a tedious experience.
We used the same spreadsheet to track how many people were invited and how many RSVPed, which was essential for getting an accurate count of invites printed and enough seating, food, and drinks for everybody at the ceremony. Now we’re using it to track gifts.
We also created a word processor document for the ceremony. We decided to write our own, officiated by Brette’s brother Zach, and the three of us would make little edits to the document up until the last minute, when we printed it out and gave the final copy to Zach.
I’m not an office power user, so the majority of the features in OpenOffice aren’t of use to me. With the several different computers I use, online storage and ubiquitous access to my documents is vastly more important than just about everything else. And the collaborative editing features have been much more useful to me than I would have originally expected. Even with work, if I’m working on a document with someone else, I’ll probably use Google Docs rather than a traditional revision control system. I just want to work on the file, not have to deal with infrastructure. Google Docs makes this easy and beautiful.