Although Google was by no means the first company to offer a cloud-based office service, it quickly emerged as the primary cloud-based competitor to Microsoft's hegemony over document creation. At a time when Microsoft seemed to be ignoring the cloud, Google served up three Web-based apps creatively named Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations--known collectively as .

Google Docs has two main advantages over Office on your desktop: It keeps your documents available on any computer you use (as well as on most smartphones), and it makes sharing and simultaneous editing easy. As a collaboration tool, it's simply awesome.

The primary disadvantage of Google Docs is that, although it claims to support Microsoft Office formats, using the service is the surest way to completely mangle the formatting and layout of any moderately complex Word document, PowerPoint presentation, or Excel spreadsheet. And in our experience, exporting Google Docs documents into their corresponding Microsoft Office formats usually produces disastrously unreadable results.

One of our favorite cloud office suites comes from . The company offers apps for just about every conceivable productivity task, from word processing to meeting hosting to calendar tracking, presentations, and accounting. It's a positively massive collection of different tools that work well together.

In addition, Zoho features excellent support for Microsoft Office formats, making it a better option than Google Docs for people who need to send their creations to Microsoft Office users. Zoho also provides a software plug-in for Microsoft Office that lets you create and edit documents from your Zoho account using the Office apps on your PC, and automatically save them back to your Zoho storage space. The plug-in is a great compromise for users who prefer working with desktop apps but want the convenience and collaboration benefits of cloud tools. Zoho apps are free for personal use; businesses pay to use the apps on a per-month and/or per-user basis.