Even though I've spent my fair share of time railing against Microsoft in this space, there is one Microsoft application I use all the time.  I use it because it is the best in the world at what it does.  I'm talking, of course, about Microsoft Word.That's right.  I've tried all the other word processors available on the Mac, and while each has some nice touches, as a whole they can't measure up to Word.  I write my article and column each week using Word.

But not this week.  Nope.  This week I'm writing this column on (or should I say, "in") a web browser.  I'm using Google Docs & Spreadsheets (hereafter referred to as "GDS"), a browser-based word processor developed by Google and currently in "beta" status.  GDS is but one of a bevy of new web-based services that appear to spring up almost daily.

In a nutshell, GDS is a full-featured word processing application that's available anytime you're online.  All you need to use Google Docs is a free Google account.  Once that's established, you select "Docs & Spreadsheets" from the top menu, and a blank document appears in your browser window.  There's a spell checker that places a red line under misspelled words, just like Word.  You can make text bold, italic, underlined, change fonts, sizes, and colors, create bulleted and numbered lists, and increase/decrease indenting, just like Word.  It can even count the words in your document, just like Word.

At regular intervals, GDS automatically saves your work to your Google account.  You can invite others to collaborate on your document.  When you're done, you can save your document to your computer as an HTML page, Word, OpenOffice, RTF, or even PDF file.