If you've been misinformed, you might think that Google Docs is a site you can visit for medical advice to cure any ailments. Thorny problems such as: "Doctor, doctor, I feel like a pair of curtains, what should I do?" To which the obvious reply is: "Get out of my surgery you madman! And don't come back until your pelmets match your fabric."

Luckily, Google Docs isn't an online clinic or a source of terrible jokes. It's actually an online word processor that's completely free to use and comes with a couple of very nifty ideas. If you've not tried it yet then you've certainly got nothing to lose by doing so: the only requirement is that you sign up for a Google account.

Google Docs offers a solid array of features. The standard stuff is all here: auto-saving, spell checking and word count, the latter of which offers a readability assessment for your document, so you can see how clearly you write, although an extremely high score might lend itself too readily to "Peter and Jane" books.

A basic range of fonts and formatting like tables and bullet points are available, but more advanced features such as page headers and footers are lacking. Some tools are also still in development: the Find and Replace, for example, is still a work in progress, labelled as "experimental."

Where Google Docs really shines is with its sharing facilities. When working with a document, you can click the share tab and specify other people as collaborators or viewers. Viewers can merely look at the document, but a collaborator can edit it fully, so if you're working with a co-writer on a project (or several) you can all utilise the same master document.

We've had considerable experience of co-authoring and this is a much neater way of working than constantly sending attachments and new master documents back and forth via e-mail (where mistakes can easily be made). A revisions tab records every change made to the relevant document, so everyone can see what writing/editing has been done and when. It's all highly organised stuff.

Google Docs works happily with Word and OpenOffice documents and you can export to these formats or RTF, PDF and HTML. We did find the occasional flaw with the formatting when testing some exporting into other word processors, but these problems were the exception rather than the rule.

It's worth noting that because this is an online word processor you'll occasionally experience very slight page loading delays, but to be honest this is barely noticeable. However, if your Internet connection goes down for any reason, obviously you can't do any work. Finally, there's also a spreadsheet program to go with Docs, which operates under a similar remit with the emphasis on sharing work online.

Google Docs not only provides a solid word processor for free, but moreover it boasts some well implemented document sharing facilities. If you're involved in any kind of collaborative project you should get on board, although be aware of the potential risks should you lose your Internet connection.