Google Docs, an alternative to MICRO$OFT Office?

In order to fulfill one of my Business 188 'Individual Technology Assignments' and continuing with the Open Source solutions for businesses, lets take a look at Google's Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft's Office.

There is no need to introduce Microsoft's Office, on the other hand not everybody is aware of Google Docs features. Google Docs spawned out of Google Labs and is one of their 'graduate' tools. It is a 'free' Web based office productivity suite which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. In order to access Google Docs you must have a gmail account to sign in. Once you sign in at Google Docs you will be able to create, edit, upload and organize your documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It has a very intuitive and simple interface. It supports (opens & saves) MS Office formats (doc, xls, ppt). It allows for real time collaboration, meaning that multiple users with an Internet connection can view or edit files simultaneously; additionally it has a chat feature for real time communication. The word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation applications have most of the features their MS Office couterpart offers, but it does lack some of the most advanced features some users utilize. Besides the lack of advanced features, security may become and issue since not every user may want to keep their sensitive documents in Google's servers (although there is a save to disk alternative). Additionally, size limitations do exist for the documents created and uploaded. Overall is very efficient and appealing, average users won't miss Office (specially the 2007 version) and if collaboration is a priority you must try it. Businesses, like these, that don't need all the 'power user' features will find it very valuable.
A very valuable feature for those of us in the field of finance is that we can construct spreadsheets to conduct stock analysis where we can use real time data from Google Finance with a function called GoogleFinance(symbol, attribute), where 'symbol' equals the stock's ticker symbol and 'attribute' can be price, volume, beta, Market Cap, etc...
Here is a cool video about Google Docs...