10.14.2008

Putting a Document Online - for free!

I have had several inquiries to some of the online services I use. Over the next few days I will tell you a bit about some of them.

This first one - is FREE and is useful for those of you who do not have ANY OTHER online parts to your business. Of course, if you do have other sites, it is a great way to have documents out there.

Did I mention free?? :)

It is called Google Documents.

If you currently have an email or other account with google (I do, which is how I have my email address (got that first) and this website (which is through google and free). The email doesn't cost - but will open up a slew of things that you can use for both your business and just for fun for you or your family.

I think that you just go to Google and sign up to get the email. Once you have that - log into your Gmail account

(you can use the Reader, a calendar, a Photo editing/storage, etc) - but what you need to click on for your webpage is "Documents"

That opens this screen:

You can see here documents I have saved and that you can later have the option to share. The neat thing is - you don't have to share any of them. If you are away from home and need to work on any kind of document (even your kids for homework) you can do it here and later access it again from your home computer.

Click on the New link in the upper left corner (or the name of a document if you want to edit it)

That will open this screen - which is almost exactly like working in Microsoft Word - which most of us do know even if our knowledge of computers is not 'up there!'

Once you have your document done - you can click the Share button in the upper right hand corner. This gives you several options - if it is something you just want to send to hostesses, club members, etc - you can email it. If you want to have the document on the web so all your customers can see it - hit publish as a webpage.



It will give you a link - this the link that it gave me to show you what I just typed. See the little box that says automatically republish when changes are made - I click that when it is things like my class schedule. Then if I add an event or a picture, it automatically does so on the viewable page that my customers see.

Now you just take the link - mine was this
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcb92qn5_49dgb6nxgw

If you know how, you can hyper link it - if not, just give your people that link. If you click on that - you will be taken to the page I just typed.

See my links at the top of this entire web? That is what I am using for my class schedule page -
Hope that helps and you find it useful.
Any questions, please don't email - but leave a comment below and I will answer them back here so everyone can get the answers.