Google Docs is a free, web-based word processor, which is part of an office suite offered by Google within its Google Drive service. It serves as a collaborative tool for editing documents in real time. Documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users simultaneously and users are able to see character-by-character changes as other collaborators make edits. They are automatically saved to Google's servers, and a revision history is automatically kept so past edits may be viewed
Documents can also be saved to a user's local computer in a variety of formats (ODF, HTML, PDF, RTF, Text, Office Open XML). (although this only works for adjacent revisions, and there is currently no way to find and isolate changes in long documents).
While Google Docs has been criticized for traditionally lacking the functionality of Microsoft Office, it has received praise for its simplicity, ease of collaboration and frequent product updates.