You may have heard of Google's numerous free services that they've unrolled over the years. Gmail is the most popular, but you also have Google Calendars, Google Maps, and so on. Today we're going to talk about Google Docs, one of the more recent innovations from the big G.

What is Google Docs? Google Docs is a software bundle that you can access straight from your web browser. It features document, spreadsheet, slideshow, and drawing editors, much like the Microsoft Office suite. The difference, of course, is that it's all free. The features of each of the software are less numerous than those of MS Office, as to be expected, but the document editor is perfectly functional. I haven't used the other ones, but I assume they are also watered down versions of their MS counterparts that still manage to get more than the job done.

Quick note: When talking about Google Docs, the default assumption is that you are talking about the document editor, so be careful to differentiate if you mean something else. This tutorial is about the document editor.

Docs originally had its own address at docs.google.com, but since the start of 2012 Google has upgraded the service to "Google Drive", which still features the software suite, but now allows you to store miscellaneous documents on a Google server. The default space is 5GB--more can be purchased--and the server is synchronized with your computer so you can drag and drop files straight to the cloud.

Visit drive.google.com to download and install your Google Drive folder. You will need a Google account.

There are several perks to using Docs. Firstly, all of your data is stored online. As you edit documents, your work is auto-saved literally at each keystroke, so you never have to worry about losing data if your computer crashes or you are disconnected from the web. You can also look over all of the revisions you made to a document on separate dates. Perhaps the most powerful feature of Docs is the ability to share your documents among friends, collaborators, or even straight to the web. This is why I started and am still using Docs, and it's probably the main reason you will be using it as well. We'll talk more about this feature in the following chapters.

Additional features include exporting to .doc, .odt, .pdf, html, and direct publishing to the web. You can store .mp3 files, images, and much more online, but you won't be able to view most of them since there is no software available in the suite for music and image editing (yet?). You will be able to download the files at any time, however, which makes Docs/Drive a handy file sharing site on top of everything else--if you have enough space. There are mobile versions available for the iPhone and Android devices, though they are far less capable than their in-browser counterparts.

Docs is updated several times a year with powerful new features; in fact, it only just came out of beta a little over a year ago, during which time it had less than half of the aforementioned features. So expect much more in time. You can always see what Google is up to next at Google Labs.

To see a full list of features for Google Docs, check out support.google.com/docs
EDIT: I've just done some investigation, and it seems you can download apps for use in Docs! More on this in the future.