Throughout your university career you will need to transfer information from one computer to another. A USB drive is ideal for this; however if you do opt for this method, can I stress how important it is to think about file formats.
USB StorageIf you're using Office 2007, the software will attempt to save your documents in the .docx format. This is a bit of a pig to work with, so it would be best if you save text files in the rich text format, with a .rtf file extension.
Online sharing
The warning about .docx also stands if you prefer to email work to yourself. I would like to recommend that everyone sign up for a good online word processing service, this will allow you to work on a document at home, and then log into your account at university and work on it there. It also means that if you forget your USB stick on deadline day, you won't have to rewrite everything from scratch.
There are three services I would recommend:
My personal preference is Google Docs because it seems the most reliable solution in my experience.
Free Office SuiteIf you want an office suite to install on your computer, check out the
OpenOffice project, which has almost all the facilities of MS Office, but is about 100 per cent cheaper.
