Practical Application

In my goal of becoming a resource for small business owners who are searching for technology solutions I'm always trying to discover practical, real life, examples of how technology really changes things. My wife and I recently had such an experience. So please bare with me as I offer you this simple but practical example of how my family is benefiting from cloud computing. Not too long ago my wife and I finally got on the same page in budgeting our family finances. We were fortunate enough to take part in the Dave Ramsey program called Financial Peace University. It was a great experience that I would recommend to almost anyone. In my opinion the single greatest benefit of the program is that it gets you and your spouse working together on planning for the family finances on a regular basis. You do this by having a budget and regular meetings. These meetings need to accommodate the geeky types that want to spend all day poring over numbers and spreadsheets. They also accommodate free spirits like myself who want to run through the numbers in 17 minutes and then move on to something more interesting.

What does this have to do with cloud computing? Well, when we have our weekly meetings we gather together and review our spread sheet. With Google Documents we were able to create a spreadsheet that we could both access separately and make changes to and those changes were saved to the same place. The fundamental problem with most spreadsheets and financial programs like Quickbooks is that they are not easily shared between 2 or more individuals. Historically the only way to share a common document or application in a home computing environment has been to log on to the same computer using the same user name and password. Usually one person is the super geek and strives to understand how these applications work. They hold the log in credentials or the spreadsheet on their local computer. In our family I'd sit down and create this really cool spreadsheet and then my wife would end up being the one to make all of the updates. She would get frustrated because I had the original version and had not made any changes to it. I was great at creating record keeping systems but horrible at the daily discipline needed to keep them up to date. So she'd get frustrated because she did not know how to use the system I'd created and was not invested in it. Especially because I was not keeping it up to date. We were having the same problem when we completed the Financial Peace University. I created a spreadsheet in Excel 2007 and she wanted to make changes to it but could not because it was on my laptop. I'd email it to her hotmail account and then we were both frustrated when we both made changes but they were on separate sheets.

With Google Documents we were able to eliminate all the frustrations and we did it for free. To create a Google Documents account you simply have to have a Gmail account.....Easy. I already had that. I logged into my Gmail account, clicked on google Docs, and uploaded my document. Then, we created a Gmail account for my wife, I went back to my account and shared it to her and that was it! Now we both make updates, mostly her, and the document is always up to date, always saved, always secure. More importantly we work more easily together and can accomplish our collective financial goals more easily with the use of technology. These are the kind of applications of technology that get me really excited. I hope that you try out Google Documents. I think this is a great innovation for the common man.

Thanks for reading